bounce rate

[garydarden]

What is your bounce rate? What is considered to be a good or average bounce rate in this industry?

Thanks!

[AmCan]

at webmasterworld the general consensus is that anything under 50% was decent, but under 40% was considered good. But of course what is the universe of sites being discussed, there it might have been "all sites".

[NicolasJohnson]

Hi Garydarden,

I'm not sure what the industry standard is, but I know that this number is something to keep an eye on. I had an affiliate talking to me once about him having an unusually high bounce rate (70+% if I remember correctly). After going into his stats which he never checked, it turned out that most of his traffic came from a few key phrases, and the pages where visitors landed on when click through didn't have any information on what the keyphrase was about.

After adding some content to the page on the subject matter that he was getting traffic for, his conversion skyroketed.

[bbonline]

It depends on your niche or the industry.
"Bounce rate is very unique to your site and page. The best way to know if you are doing better or worse is to set your own baseline and compare your performance over time."

[LiveCasinoPartners]

I do not worry about bounce rate so much. If the potential player comes to your site and likes what he sees and clicks on a banner or add you've just have a quality click. That's pretty much why I don't stress too much on the bounce rate.

[TheBoyMitchell]

Although bounce rate is handy - if you can see what keywords people are coming to your site from and then bouncing, then they arent finding what they are looking for. Therefore work on those areas of the site and introduce more content etc.

For example is you have 'poker rules' or 'no limit holdem' as keywords and visitors via them, but no sales and a high bounce, and no real content about each of them (ie you were just using them as keywords to generate traffic), then you need to built pages or content around them - after all thats what the visitors were look for.

Clicks are good, but they dont pay the bills.

(just my opinion like)

[Doolally]

I believe that Google as starting to look at bouce rates and incorporating them as part of its search algorithm. Anyone provide more info or confirm?

[lots0]

I believe that Google as starting to look at bouce rates and incorporating them as part of its search algorithm. Anyone provide more info or confirm?

How would google know the bounce rate for sites without google tracking software? They wouldn't... so using the bounce rate as part of the search algo would not include the majority of websites on the www.

Bounce Rate is also an irrelevant kind of statistic.

On one site I have a bounce rate of ~75% but the average length of stay on the page is well over 5 minutes...

Bounce rate without the the time on page is not relevant.

[TheGooner]

More to the point - a high "bounce rate" can actually mean that a single page is doing the job.

Our sites have overall bounce rates varying from low 30's to mid 50's depending on the site and the time of the year.

But our partner review pages (casino, bookmaker, poker site reviews) have ther highest bounce rates at around 60% average.

Am I worried? No - because analysis has shown that most visitors land into the page based on a relevant key word or phrase - and the location of their bounce is directly to the site being reviewed !


Meanwhile our match preview traffic has a very low bounce rate (people often read multiple pages) but the conversion rates based on direct linking to partner sites is much lower.

So generic talk about good/bad "bounce rates", and google ranking on it seems way off the mark.There would need to be a modifier for good bounces - to the intended target.

[MichaelCorfman]

Bounce rates vary dramatically by site and by page.

For example, the GPWA website has a very low overall site bounce rate of a hair under 35%. But the bounce rate on the home page is much better than that at just over 17% and the bounce rate on the main forum page is just under 17%. More specific pages, like specific forum threads often have much higher bounce rates. Hard to know whether that is because visitors tend to find what they want on the specific page and then leave, or whether they decide the pages are not good matches for what they are after.

Our online.casinocity.com website has a higher bounce rate, but I view it is still very respectable at 45.17% this past month. The rate on the home page beat the site average by a third with a bounce rate of 30.68%.

And then our casinocitytimes.com website has a much higher bounce rate of 71.82% for the whole site. The home page of the site has a much lower bounce rate of 30.75%. Individual articles often have high bounce rates. For example, an article by Nelson Rose, a respected attorney convering gaming law, had 5,235 page views and 4,804 unique views in the past month and a bounce rate of 90.7%. Most of those were from Google. In the case of this article, I think the high bounce rate is because folks got exactly what they were after just looking at this page. The title of the article was "Minimum Legal Age to Place a Bet" and it contained a table with the legal gambling ages for several different types of gambling by state, and the most common search terms in order of frequency were for "gambling age", "legal gambling age", "nevada gambling age", "gambling age by state", "gambling age in mississippi", and "gambling age in california." With those search terms I think google would have been hard-pressed to return a better result.

Michael