What is an acceptable bounce rate?
-
0% is of course the best case and 100% would be the worst case but what would is considered average. How do you address this subject with your clients?
-
I use www.blizzardmetrics.com to analyze bounce rates from a benchmark standpoint. Here is some data from November 2016 for 135 websites - Overall Bounce Rate 39.7%, Mobile Bounce Rate: 43.1%, Tablet Bounce Rate 53.7, Desktop Bounce Rate 39.7, Bounce rate from Organic Search Engines 38.4%, Bounce Rate from Direct Type-in: 59.9%, Bounce Rate from Referrals 28.7 (something fishy here, it was 54.1% in October and 69.4% in Nov 16), Bounce Rate from email 61.4 and Bounce Rate from Social 35.3.
This data is dynamic, if you head over to Blizzardmetrics, and add your site, all the numbers will update! If you are an agency and add a bunch of website, you can look at JUST your websites, or, all websites. You can also categorize by industry.
-
I have worked on well over 250 websites and most sites I have worked on have a BR from 15% to 50% and one as low as 3%, but instead of speculating in what is good or not why not let the words from Google's own Analytics Guru tell us what his POV is: "According to Google Analytics Guru Avinash Kausik “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying”. Low/Good bounce rate indicates that visitor engagement on your site is good." There you have it. To add some statistical research here some research findings from rocketfuel.com that has his numbers staggered a little bit different, but kind of along the lines with Avinash: "As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. 56 to 70 percent is higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. Anything over 70 percent is disappointing for everything outside of blogs, news, events, etc. - See more at: http://www.gorocketfuel.com/the-rocket-blog/whats-the-average-bounce-rate-in-google-analytics "
-
Thanks for the great advice. It is Greatly appreciated.
James Gonzales
-
Once you drill down to keywords, pages, time-on page and %exit, I think you'll probably see pretty quickly where you can address some things that will help.
I think you're right on the money with keeping your content fresh.
Good luck.
-
Thanks for the help on this. I went back and looked at our history and noticed that on each site we own our bounce rate increased as traffic to our sites increased. Early on we had our best site with a bounce rate of 36% and a year later we are at 41%. Our product is real estate. I may need to re-fresh our content on the landing pages or maybe it is just the increase and the quality of inbound links that have affected this metric.
-
Depends on the purpose of the page too.
EG: If your call to action of a page is to call a phone number, then a high bounce rate is acceptable due to the purpose being met.
Bounce rate is a great metric to measure improvements and calls to action. Try and get it lower by all means, but there's no silver bullet with bounce rate or magic number.
As David mentioned, a bounce could mean elimination of an unqualified lead, either way it's quality over quantity in most cases.Good luck.
-
Sorry, but there's no one-size-fits-all answer regarding what is acceptable and unacceptable. You should be taking into consideration the intent of the site to help determine what is acceptable. Let me give you an example:
One of our landing pages had a bounce rate of 58%. This was problematic because the landing was designed to generate leads. In essence we only had a shot at converting the 42% of traffic that didn't bounce when they hit the page. And of those, we were converting about 6%. For that particular product, we converted 5 out of every 100 leads generated, and the average lifetime value of the client was about $3K.
Long story short, it worth our time to deal with the higher bounce rate because the potential value of each lead was rather substantial. So, take it on a case-by-case basis, but remember that it's been said Google takes bounces rates into consideration as a ranking factor.
-
I would suggest a couple of things.
First of all I would suggest that bounce rate could be compared to a pulse. Over time, you'll discover an acceptable bounce rate (pulse) for a particular site and those rates may vary from site to site. An acceptable site bounce rate for us is about 50-55%. If the rate pushes toward 60%, it tells me there is something going on that I need to investigate more deeply.
If you're in ecommerce, product feeds will affect your bounce rate and you'll need to identify products that adversely inflate your bounce rate and address accordingly.
Secondly, bounce rate also applies to pages (which in turn affects site rate). Its relatively easy to identify pages that are affecting bounce rate. I know what pages on our site will have a higher bounce rate than others. If there is something I can do do reduce the bounce rate for a page, I do it.
Having said all that, I would throw a guess out there that an acceptable bounce rate would be between 45 and 65% with a rate in the 50% being realistic.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Adjustable Bounce Rate
Hi I've been looking at analysing bounce rate in more depth, I wondered what people's views on adjustable bounce rate were? I've been reading this article http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2322974/how-to-implement-adjusted-bounce-rate-abr-via-google-tag-manager-tutorial Is it worth adding this? Or is it just as useful to look at time on page over bounce rate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Should I set a max crawl rate in Webmaster Tools?
We have a website with around 5,000 pages and for the past few months we've had our crawl rate set to maximum (we'd just started paying for a top of the range dedicated server at the time, so performance wasn't an issue). Google Webmaster Tools has alerted me this morning that the crawl rate has expired so I'd have to manually set the rate again. In terms of SEO, is having a max rate a good thing? I found this post on Moz, but it's dated from 2008. Any thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiamMcArthur0 -
Does this setup meet the ratings rich snippet guidelines?
Hey everyone, I am setting up a few product landing pages and hope to be able to see the star ratings via the search engine. I attached a screenshot of the SCHEMA code included on the page and results from the testing tool. On each landing page there are 3 reviews taken from the product page and the overall rating of the product. There are also 2 links directly to the product page. Google states that: Make sure the reviews and ratings you mark up are readily available to users from the marked-up page. It should be immediately obvious to users that the page has review or ratings content. Do you guys think the landing page set up I described above is sufficient to comply with google's guidelines? yafujZe.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TVape0 -
SEO mobile app optimization: multi tag link alternate media per every devices is acceptable in the desktop page?
Hi All, Hi hope someone could answer to this question because on internet I haven't found a clear solution so far: I have: 1 desktop website (let's make www.example.com) and different mobile websites for each main device (let's make iphone.example.mobi; android.example.mobi; winphone.example.mobi) In order to optimize my mobile websites, According to the Google guideline of the above separate urls configuration , I should add a tag link alternate media in the desktop page and a canonical tag in the corresponding mobile page in order to create a connection between them. But, I need to keep a 1-to-1 connection between desktop page and mobile page (Google recommends to have 1 desktop page linked to 1 mobile page and viceversa and discourages the 1-to-multi connections). What I would like: In my case, I have to add the a single desktop page of desktop site (example www.example.com/category1/), 3 links alternate media tag,( one for iphone.example.mobi, one for android.example.mobi and one for winphone.example.mobi). Furthemore, I have to add a canonical tag in every corresponding mobile page of the 3 mobile site version, a canonical tag pointing to my sektop page www.example.com/category1/. Now my worries are: having a single desktop page with 3 different link alternate tags pointing to 3 different mobile websites (one each), is something or not aligned to the google seo mobile guideline? If not, How should I configure my desktop website and my 3 mobile web applications(iphone, android, winphone) in order to follow the Google requirements for Separate urls apllication? Thanks, Massimliano
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdiRste0 -
Advance SEO: Values accepted in google parameters
Hello Mozzers, What values are accepted in parameter field in webmaster? I want to block URL's with + in them. Parameters does not seem to accept + as a valid value Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozAddict0 -
Has anyone here successfully been accepted into Yahoo News?
I've tried applying a couple times through their form over the last six months with no response. Has anyone here been accepted as a news source, and if so, what did you do? To clarify, I mean accepted into the Yahoo News index (submission form here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/news_global/submitsource.html?from_url=http%3A%2F%2Fhelp.yahoo.com%2Fkb%2Findex%3B_ylt%3DAm2jThOClBnKBsnrNsRjE6a5OSV4%3Fpage%3Dproduct%26amp%3By%3DPROD_NEWS%26amp%3Blocale%3Den_US&last_url=http%3A%2F%2Fhelp.yahoo.com%2Fkb%2Findex%3B_ylt%3DAm2jThOClBnKBsnrNsRjE6a5OSV4%3Fpage%3Dproduct%26amp%3By%3DPROD_NEWS%26amp%3Blocale%3Den_US) We've already been accepted into Google News and Bing News, but not Yahoo News
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
When doing email blogger outreach what response rate do you expect?
How many emails do you send in the average outreach campaign? How many links would you expect from that? Also - when doing email blogger outreach do you need to offer the blogger something other than (great) content, in order to get a link? (maybe cash, or a link back?) I'm doing email blogger outreach for a number of clients and types of content, but am finding it hard to get links from bloggers. Any help is appreaciated! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevinmorley0 -
Blog - on the domain or place on separate site, now that Panda ranks for bounce, TOP, depth of visit
Over 10 years ago, we decided to run our blog external to our main website. contrary to conventional wisdom then, we thought we’d have more control/opps for generating external anchor text links, plus working in a bona fide blog software environment (WP). As we had hoped, the blog generated alot of strong inbound links, captured inbound links of it own from other sites and I think, helped improve our SERPs and traffic. Once the blog was established and with the redesign of the website, we capitulated, and finally moved the blog onto the main domain. After reading a number of pieces on Panda and the new reality of SEO, sounds like bounce rates (in particular), time on page, and other GA measures may have a more profound influence on google rankings now. Given that blogs are notoriously for high bounce rates (ours is), low time on site, depth of visit, seems logical that it adversely affects our site averages for the main domain). Is it time to re-consider pulling our blog off the main domain to reassert the ‘true’ GA measures of the main domain? I guess it still gets down to the question... is the advantage of all the inbound links to the blog on the main domain of greater value than moving the blog off-site and reasserting better 'site stats' for google's pando algo? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahw0