What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave ("bounce") rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site. By default, Google Analytics considers a visitor to have interacted with your site if they visited at least one additional page.

How is Bounce Rate Calculated?

Bounce rate is calculated by the total number of one-page visits divided by the total number of entries to a website. For example, if the homepage of a website receives 1,000 visitors over the course of a month, and 500 of those visitors leave the site after viewing the homepage without proceeding to any other pages, then the bounce rate of the homepage would be 50%.

What is a good Bounce Rate?

The definition of a “good” bounce rate is subjective based on the type of page and the source of traffic. For example, if you have an informational article that answers a specific question, and the primary source of the traffic to the page is from organic search, the bounce rate of the page could be as high as 90%. This doesn’t mean that the page is necessarily a “bad bounce rate” even though it has a high bounce rate, it could just mean that the user found exactly what they were looking for, and no longer had any need to view any other pages. Conversely, a page with a low bounce rate may not necessarily be “good” if it has a poor user experience.

Most websites will see bounce rates fall somewhere between 26% and 70%. The average bounce rate for the websites in my sample set was 49%. The average bounce rate for all visits in the set was 45%. As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26% to 40% is excellent. 41% to 55% is roughly average. 56% to 70% is higher than average, but may not be cause for alarm depending on the website. Anything over 70% is disappointing for everything outside of blogs, news, events, etc.