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What is Normal Bounce Rate? (Weekly Q&A)

Bounce rateThere’s an interesting discussion over at SEOchat forums discussing bounce rate.

While the question does have too many “it depends”, it’s quite a valid one. Many website owners, looking into their Google Analytics numbers, must be asking themselves the same thing: When am I supposed to get worried about my bounce rate numbers?

Generally Speaking…

In the thread, Trevor Stolber outlines the general numbers:

A bounce rate of

50% or less is excellent
60-70% is typical
70-80% is poor
80%+ is very bad

Of course, keep in mind there’s no such a thing as a “perfect bounce rate”…

The Word of Wisdom…

In another discussion, Tedster puts it nicely:

Bounce rate (as determined by standard analytics packages) is a notoriously challenging metric. I’ve seen a high performing page with a bounce rate of 85% – and this was a page with 750,000 search visits per week from 4 very competitive query terms!

Another discussion elaborates on different types of sites having different types of “normal” bounce rate:

news, entertainment, sports,etc. should have lower bounce rates. Feature websites that perform specific actions (eg: weather.com ) should have higher bounce rate.

In a word, it’s nothing to go crazy about unless you see the number suddenly go up dramatically (which usually happens after the redesign).

Further Reading:

check Bounce Rate (official Google Analytics Guide)
check Towards a True Bounce Rate (must read!)
check Bounce Rate Demystified (infographic)

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26 Responses

  1. Had no idea about bounce rates though I had heard about it 2-3 times. It seems like a complicated concept to me as a well performing page having a somewhat average bounce rate. We definitely need more discussion on this topic to understand it better.

  3. It really depends on the type of website it is. If the most important information can be found on one page- like the business phone number or address- a higher bounce rate might not be as big of a deal.

  4. Tis a question I was a little interested in as well would be how the bounce rate effected different websites and generally when they get concerned. Though I did assume a weather app would have a much higher bounce rate than the average blog.

    My recommendation for lowering your bounce rate on blogs (if it’s high) is to remove web annoyances (autoplaying music and videos for example) and have relevant and interesting content (which goes without saying).

    Since the days of Geocities, web practices have changed, but the web annoyances relatively stays the same while slowly adding newer annoyances. Removing these annoyances and providing good content will save you from bounce rate hell in most cases.

    Thanks for sharing. I’ll tweet this and share it to my G+.

  6. My bounce rate is 80.5% and my site has affiliate links. It would be great if you suggest me few tips to reduce the bounce rate of affiliate sites..

  7. My bounce rate is at 72 right now for webmoneytips.net – design is good, content is fresh written. How can I get my bounce rate down?

  8. Thank you, Ann. I like to compare bounce rates from page to page. That gives me insight to visitor goals. How much do the search engines count bounce rate in the algorithms? Got me 🙂

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