What is an acceptable bounce rate?

[jjgonza]

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?

[TrentBlizzard]

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.

[peterpumkineater]

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 "

[jjgonza]

Thanks for the great advice. It is Greatly appreciated.

James Gonzales

[AWCthreads]

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.

[jjgonza]

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.

[Daylan]

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.

[explorionary]

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.

[AWCthreads]

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.