Marketing Glossary

Bounce Rate

What is bounce rate?

If someone lands on a single page when they visit your website, it is called a bounce. Your bounce rate could be considered the visitor percentage that viewed one page and leaves without viewing any further pages in a single session.

The bounce rate is a measure of sessions that started and ended on the same page instead of scrolling all the way back to where you were. The bounce rate, or pogo stick behaviour, tells search engines which pages are not useful for visitors.

In the context of the following scenarios, consider what bounce rate means

It’s not uncommon for businesses to see a high bounce rate on their websites.

The user read the article and decided to leave without interacting with it (positive)

If you are looking for an item and clicking on ‘products,’ but the product does not appear automatically, then this may mean that it has been sold out or never will. (negative)

When trying to contact a business, a customer can search for them on Google and then fill out a contact form. After submitting the form, they should see a ‘thank you message’ displayed on the same page that they completed it. If they close the browser right away, it will still count as a bounce if they haven’t clicked on another page. (positive)

The importance of bounce rate

As a standard practice for media companies and web publishers, it is important to measure how effective their website design is. To do that, the bounce rate should be set as the measurement of interest.

Bounce rate only tells us about a number of things, but it doesn’t tell us what we really want to know: how engaged people are with your landing page.

Marketers often measure bounce rate without considering how long users stay on the site and all they engage so it is useless as a metric. Instead, page admins can fire Javascript scripts to track significant events made by visitors during one visit.”

Depending on the type of content that appears, some users may have a low level of satisfaction with your website or marketing campaign. By recording their initial responses to content, you can pinpoint what is causing dissatisfaction and address it.

Navigate between the letters, to explore the glossary terms