Bounce rate can be pulled from Google Analytics. This Google tool serves to measure user traffic to a website and analyze where it comes from, when we have the most visits, which pages of our site are the most visited, which channel traffic reaches our website through, etc.
Google Analytics is, as we were saying, an essential tool, not only for those of us who work in digital marketing, but also for any company that wants to measure its web traffic, understand how that traffic is generated and build or change marketing strategies based on the data Analytics gives us.
Definition of bounce rate
One of the many figures Analytics reports to us is our website’s bounce rate. You are probably familiar with the technical definition Google itself gives us: “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions, that is, sessions in which the user left your site on the landing page without interacting with it”.
Under this definition and, to begin with, we can say that having a high bounce rate is not optimal. When a user reaches our site what we want is for them to browse several of its pages, to interact and to stay on the website for a while. That will show interest in our page, in our company and in our products or services. That is, when a user reaches our website and only browses the page they landed on and then leaves, we take it that they were not very interested in our company or in what we explain on our website.
Factors that can determine the bounce rate
But there are other factors that can also determine the bounce rate and not all of them are bad. Let me explain, and I will start with other negative reasons, beyond little interest in our company, that can cause a high bounce rate:
- Complex web architecture or complex, unfriendly navigation. We often come across websites that make navigation difficult for us, whose architecture does not invite it, and this factor can cause the user to come in and leave because they cannot find in the menus or in some prominent format how to reach other content of interest to them.
- Display problems on mobile. Browsing on mobile devices keeps growing, but despite this many websites are still not adapted for mobile and we have to keep “zooming” in to see the content or, worse still, the content is misaligned. Clearly, users who reach a site on a mobile and find a page that is impossible to view and even less to navigate leave it within a second.
- Slow loading speed. This is another of the most important factors causing bounces, that is, leaving the website without going beyond the first landing page. When you visit a website and it already takes a while to load the first page, you leave. We do not want to wait; users who reach our page must get in quickly if we want them to stay on our website and keep browsing it.
In this article we are not going to go into how Google penalises the ranking of websites that are not optimized for mobile and that have a slow loading speed, but clearly these two factors are also a serious problem for achieving an SEO positioning and SEM.
Can a bounce rate not be a bad thing?
But staying with bounce rate, let us also look at the case where it may not be a bad thing. When we run a strategy of professional SEM positioning and correct, we must make sure the search the user runs on Google in which our ad is shown matches their interests as closely as possible. This ad will take them to the landing page we have set up in the ad and if the landing page’s relevance really does fully match their search and their needs it is very likely that the conversion will already happen there and the user will not need to keep browsing our site.
The user ran a very specific search, our Search ad matching that search appeared, and it took them to the page where they found what they needed and they have already bought or requested information.
But, with the exception of these specific SEM or SEO strategies, websites should and can improve their bounce rate, mainly by reviewing the site architecture and navigation and optimizing speed and how it looks on mobile devices.