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Bounce rate

What is bounce rate

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

Specifically, the bounce rate of a website is the total number of bounces across all the pages on the website (in a given time period) / total number of entrances across all the pages on the website (in the same time period).

How to identify high bounce rate pages

Obviously, you’ll want to identify high traffic pages where you see a lot of people are dropping off; this is where you will focus on making improvements. Let’s look pages with the highest bounce rate. To do this, navigate to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages in Google Analytics. Then, click the Bounce Rate column to sort by this metric. Finally, select Weighted from the Sort Type dropdown to make sure you are looking at statistically significant data. A weighted sort ensures you see important pages at the top, so you won’t simply see a bunch of one-hit pages with 100% bounce rate.

Once we’ve identified these as high traffic/high bounce pages, we can take a closer look to determine why people are leaving and what changes can be made to keep them on the site longer.

We may:

  • Navigate to these pages as a user and watch for red flags. Are pages taking a long time to load? Are images broken? Technical problems can deter users from staying on the site.
  • Think about adding elements that encourage users to stay on the site longer, such as linking to other relevant posts and products.
  • Look at the site on different devices. While you may encounter a positive experience navigating through the site on a laptop, you may find the mobile version difficult to use.

In addition, we should look at where these bouncers are coming from. Add Source / Medium (or Campaign) as a secondary dimension as shown below. If you see that a particular source or campaign is sending a lot of bouncing traffic, you may want to consider revising your marketing strategy – particularly if you are paying for the traffic that is bouncing.

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