Everything about bounce rates

What the bounce rate means

The bounce rate is one of the many indicators that tell you enough without ever seeing or speaking to the person. Bounce is an indicator of whether or not a match is a match. You can improve that match in various areas. What you say you offer on the page and what you actually find are not always in line with each other. But the website speed or loading time, for example, also affects. And what about a mismatch when it comes to the target group? It is quite possible that your target group is not visiting/using your website...

What is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave the page immediately. It is then referred to as 'a bounce'. Bouncing is translated directly from English: bounce. So someone who immediately 'bounces' away when touched by your website is nice and bouncing. If you have 100 visitors and 50 of them close the page, your bounce rate is 50%. It doesn't matter how long they've been visiting the page: bounce is bounce!

Is a low bounce rate positive?

If your bounce is low (or if you have a low bounce rate), this generally means that you're giving the larger share of that page's visitors what they're looking for. So in short: a low bounce rate is definitely positive!

What does a high bounce rate mean for the website?

For you as a website owner, a high bounce rate means that you will have to look for the cause. This is because bounce rates can be influenced in various ways, but if you change something that is already good, you will make it unclear and you will never know if what you are doing is good. So don't start randomly changing things, but be patient: it will be fine!

What influences the bounce rate?

Enticing a large group of people to visit your website, but actually not giving them exactly what that large group of people needs isn't really what you'd call a success. Many companies see findability and SEO as an exact synonym for “getting a lot of people to the website”. This is not correct: many people do not equal many “good” people. Focus on the good people: the amount will follow automatically.

So let's have a look what influences the bounce rate:

1. Better meta data: enticing people to come to your website starts with meta data. This is mainly what search engines such as Google use to display your website with relevant search terms. You may be hooking up on a search term that doesn't match your information; so you can adjust the meta data to match better!
2. Deliver better content: did you fall in love with a search term and that's why you wrote that meta data? If you have a high bounce in this scenario, your content doesn't match what people need. So focus on the content of the page. Make sure it matches what people are looking for.

What else contributes to bounce rates?

So you now have good meta data, bring in people and the content has been updated. What else can you do? What else contributes to bounce rates?

Give the visitor the opportunity to interact

Without interactions with the page, high bounce rates are inevitable. Imagine you're looking for dog toys and you find a page that tells you about them. It's fun to read, but you'd love to know more about one of the dog toys that the website lists. You just can't find how to continue reading about it fast enough, so what do you do? Just go back to your favorite search engine and enter a new search.

Nice article, but you, as a visitor, have had no opportunity to interact with the website. After reading the article, it was done. You didn't click, you didn't select any text, and you didn't need to open an image. So it's all good. But the website does get a higher bounce because that interaction has not been there.

Hint: include a list of relevant links to other articles at the bottom of the page and make sure these articles match the content of the page. Also, try placing a number of links in between. Ask questions or let people calculate something. The interaction is extremely important!

Deliver content faster

Bounce percentages reflect well whether the page is well put together or not. We've talked about meta data and content so far, but speed matters again. A large number of people definitely can't stand slow websites. Opening the website has already started, including measuring performance. But it takes a long time! People who close the page in this phase are also considered a bounce here.

So deliver the content faster, or at least load the top section first, this lowers people's need to find an answer quickly or get away from that slowness. Of course, it is ideal if you optimize the entire website.