How Google Analytics calculates bounce rate
Every page on your website should have your Google Analytics tracking ID in the code. When someone visits your website, this code fires and triggers a session.
If a visitor leaves your site without further interaction, the session expires, and their visit is classed as a bounce. If they click through to another page or perform an action that triggers an event, like filling out a contact form, the code fires again and tells GA that it’s not a bounce.
However, things aren’t always this simple because many things affect if and how the code is fired. Your data is skewed one way or another by:
Ad blockers. These usually prevent tracking codes from firing, so you won’t see these users in your analytics at all.
Slow-loading pages: Impatient users might bounce before the tracking code loads.
Session timeouts: There are multiple ways sessions can expire even if the user plans to engage with the website further.
Improper tracking setup: We’ll look into that later.
Is bounce rate important?
Bounce rate is an important metric. It’s useful for assessing user engagement and indicating that there might be something wrong with your tracking setup.
But it’s also an overrated and often misused metric. To prove this point, try sorting the campaigns below from best to worst. For simplicity, assume that we spent the same on each of them and that the quality of leads (signups) is equal.
I used to give a slightly more elaborate version of this task to interviewees for marketing positions. Most considered bounce rate when making their decision.
In reality, bounce rate doesn’t matter here. What we care about is ROI. You can tell the ROI by comparing the percentage of users each campaign brought with the respective percentage of sign ups. But we can also calculate the conversion rates:
Campaign #1: 0.07%
Campaign #2: 0.22%
Campaign #3: 0.94%
Campaign #4: 1.03%
Campaign #5: 5.02%
Campaign #6: 0.79%
So, from best to worst: 5 > 4 > 3 > 6 > 2 > 1.
The point here is that campaigns #6 and #1 have the best bounce rates, but they’re terrible at directly converting the users.
Differences between bounce rate, exit rate, and dwell time
Many people confuse these three metrics, and some even use them interchangeably. So let’s look at how both exit rate and dwell time compare with bounce rate.
Exit rate
Exit rate shows the percentage of sessions that ended on a particular page.
For example, imagine that three people visit your website, and their sessions look like this:All of the sessions started on page A, which has a bounce rate of 33%. Both B and C have bounce rates of 0% because no session started on those pages.
The exit rate looks different, though:
The exit rate for page A = 33%
The exit rate for page B = 100%
The exit rate for page C = 0%
None of the three visitors exited the site from page C, one exited on page A (from three sessions with A in them), and two exited on page B (from two sessions with B in them).
Dwell time
Dwell time is the amount of time between a user clicking on a search result and returning to the SERP. Unlike bounce rate, it’s not a metric you’ll find in Google Analytics. The SEO community created it because it’s thought to be a possible ranking factor.
You can technically set up custom dwell time tracking in GA, but that’s way out of the scope of this article.
How to interpret and use bounce rate the right way
The rule of thumb with analytics is to know what you’re looking for and then use filters and segments to isolate and investigate that data. And that means looking at data with common traits.
For example, looking at bounce rates for different channels doesn’t make sense because it’s aggregated across all campaigns and landing pages.Our advice is never to look at bounce rates on aggregated reports like this.
Bounce rates differ from page to page, so you’ll always want to include the landing page dimension into your reports, then choose a channel you want to analyze.
In my case, I went to the Landing Pages report (Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages), then removed the default “All Users” segment and applied an “Organic Traffic” segment instead:To narrow things down further, we’ll look for a common trait in the “Landing Page” dimension and exclude statistically insignificant pages. We can do this by filtering for product pages with the word “apparel” in the URL (common trait), and excluding pages with one hundred sessions or fewer (statistically insignificant):
Still, it’s important not to get too carried away by your average bounce rate because popular pages skew that number. It’s better to check the median bounce rate, which is 46.78% here (the filtered report has 15 pages, so the 8th page contains the median value).
If a page has a higher than median bounce rates, it may be a sign that:
The page needs a better user experience (you’ll learn what to focus on later)
Your title tag and/or meta description doesn’t align with your page’s content, so users leave. The same can apply to ad copy for your performance channels.
It’s a type of page where people bounce naturally.
Let me expand on the third point.
Imagine that you’re looking up contact information for a company. You Google “{company} contact,” click-through and write an email or call them. The page provided all you needed, yet you most likely bounced.
There are even categories of pages that will naturally generate bounces yet satisfy the user. Think about recipes. You usually look them up when you need them. You probably won’t jump from a carbonara recipe to a pizza dough recipe even if they’re linked together. You only want to cook the pasta.
You always need to think about the actual content on the page and why people land on it. But at the end of the day, you’re still doing quantitative analysis. You’ll get more insights by analyzing actual user behavior. We’ll touch more on the topic of qualitative analysis at the end of this article.
All in all, these tips apply to any metric, not just bounce rate. You need to know how they’re measured, what they really mean, and use them in the right context.
What is a good what is bounce rate vs exit rate ? what’s the difference? 2021
It depends. There’s no such thing as a universally “good bounce rate.” There are many marketing channels and multiple phases of the customer journey, and bounce rates differ between landing pages and their traffic sources and Ayushman jena has best example for this go and check out he’s blog
For example, here’s the performance for Google’s Merchandise Store homepage segmented by marketing channel:
