Video Series Content / Vlog

How to Analyze Your Bounce Rate

Name: Soud Marketing
Price range: $$

November 2, 2020

Your bounce rate is an important analytics metric that is often misunderstood. Let’s look at how to accurately analyze your bounce rate.

First, keep in mind that when you look at the top-level metrics, it’s an average. The bounce rate for your entire site is an average of all your pages – some that likely have a decent bounce rate and others that may have a high bounce rate.

Instead of looking at the bounce rate for your entire site, look at the bounce rate either page by page or section by section. Compare the bounce rate of your home page to your service pages, your product page to your blog page, etc. The macro-level report isn’t very helpful because it doesn’t accurately tell the story of your site and where you need to make improvements.

When looking at the bounce rate, consider the content and what you’re asking people to do.

If you’re running digital ad campaigns (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) that are sending people to a landing page and asking them to opt into something with their email address, understand that this will automatically create a higher than average bounce rate. Some people won’t want to submit their email so they will leave the page immediately, creating a high bounce rate.

So, having a 70-80% bounce rate on an opt-in page is not necessarily a bad thing. It simply reflects people that were checking out your offer but then weren’t quite ready to opt-in yet. Plus, it means you likely have a 20% conversion rate, which is really good.

When it comes to your service pages, you should have a lower bounce rate. Your service pages should do a good job of explaining your services, your craft, and your process. This information will move people down the page and hopefully get them to click through to another page, therefore lowering the bounce rate.

What do you do if you have a high bounce rate on an important page?

For example, let’s say you have a high bounce rate (65-90%) on one of your key service pages. If this is the case, there are two things you need to look into:

If you’re sending ads to this page, make sure your ad is clear and truthful about what people will be clicking to. Don’t use a bait and switch method simply to get more ad clicks. The ad and creative should accurately reflect your offer on the landing page.

Consider improving your content. If you have a high bounce rate on a service or product page, it’s time to revisit the content. Make sure there are headlines and sub-headlines so that it’s scannable. Make sure the photos and videos are a clear, truthful representation of your service/product. Finally, make sure your content accurately relays your unique benefits, features, and selling points. If you think your content meets all these requirements, then it may be a matter of simply rearranging it into a different order.

Look at all of this as testing. You need to see digital marketing as consistently testing a lot of different things to see what works and what doesn’t.