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16 September 2009 16:12pm
I represent an ecommerce site with approx 70,000 visits a week. Our Bounce Rate is around 40% - which we consider high, but I wanted to see whether this is quite standard or not? I'm interested in hearing what others think - and if they have a site of similiar size, what bounce rate you have. Thanks - Anon.
European Web Analytics Specialist at Canon Europe
17 September 2009 11:02am
You should segment your bouncing visitors by entry type ie. ppc campaign, natural keyword/phrase, email etc.
The segments that deliver higher rates of bounce will be where there is little or less convergence between user expectations and site content.
From that point you can move forward by amending/stopping campaigns that deliver non-convergent traffic and/or optimise your site for the specific expectations - perhaps consider campaign landing pages rather than a one-size-fits homepage.
Let me know your thoughts...
European Web Analytics Specialist at Canon Europe
17 September 2009 11:05am
sorry - to directly answer your question - bounce is too subjective - anything between 15-50% can be normalish...it is not something you should really benchmark against competitors :)
Senior Product Manager at brightsolid online publishing
23 September 2009 09:58am
There's a lot of factors to take into consideration - especially around your brand name, your SEO and your PPC, your ability to deep link to relevant pages. But yes, if that was my bounce rate I would be scrambling to identify the cause and fix it....that's a lot of marketing budget being sprayed....a lot of wasted visits
14 October 2009 10:56am
I have slightly higher number of visitors (c.100k weekly) to my site and my bounce rate is c. 20%.... as a benchmark. Compare that with last year and we have moved from where you are at in the 12 months.....
Head of Ecommerce at Lovehoney
15 October 2009 12:24pm
We've got a similar situation +100k visitors per week, and track bounce rate by traffic source and whether new or repeat visitor - trick is to use it as an internal benchmark - find the phrases/sources that have anything over about 35% bounce and work to lower that.
However though, you can get "death by landing page", so something we're looking at the moment is search-specific content, parsing the visitors initial search query and loading up content elements on the homepage that address that need. It's early days so no results yet, but I'll let you know!
CEO at Econsultancy
20 October 2009 09:30am
As the others have said, a bounce rate is only really useful as an internal benchmark and you need to sub-segment your audience to see how much it varies e.g. by existing customers vs. new visitors (by source of traffic).
If it makes you feel better we get around 70,000 visitors to this site per week and our bounce rate is over 60%!
However, as per notes above this masks the fact that:
- As a publisher we have lots of people just visit one page e.g. a blog article, forum post like this etc. Obviously we'd like them to look at more than one page but if you have lots of content you tend to get a higher overall average bounce rate (compared, say, to an e-commerce site)
- This bounce rate is much higher for, say, Twitter-referred visitors (typically just dipping in to a blog article via a referral) than, say, email-referred visitors. New visitors bounce rate is much higher than repeat visitors etc.
- We do well in natural search (as we have lots of content, lots of links etc.). As a result we often rank on irrelevant terms (e.g. 'Britney Spears' or 'ipod'!) which drive lots of traffic but they soon leave when they see what the site is actually about and who it's for. So good for traffic numbers but not good for actual business value for us, and makes our bounce rates higher.
Conversion Consultant at Latitude
20 October 2009 11:47am
What should your bounce rate be? The only real correct answer to this is, lower than it was yesterday. You need use your web analytics to identify the real issues - start looking at the bounce rates of the relevant targeted search terms. You will probably find that many users are finding your site via long tail irrelevant terms which are boosting your overall site bounce rate. This is why as a site average, bounce rate is really not a good metric to be concerned with.
Website Analytics Manager at NewLook
25 February 2013 17:01pm
Hi all
I know this is a 3 year old conversation thread but i just wanted to check if anyone knows what an average "Homepage" bounce rate is for retail industry?
thanks
Ash