What is Bounce Rate? Its role

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Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a given website that leave the site after viewing only a single page. Used in Web analytics, often for CRM analysis, this metric helps the website owner assess the effectiveness of the content. A high bounce rate can be interpreted to mean either that the content is not relevant to its target market or that the site is not attracting its target market effectively.

Bounce rate can be measured in one of two ways: either determining the number of people who enter the website but “bounce” before exploring anything other than the entry page or determining which visitors leave the site after only a brief time period, generally five seconds.

Bounce rates for websites and those for single pages are calculated differently. The bounce rate for a single page is calculated by dividing the number of visitors who entered that page and then bounced by the total number of visitors to that page. The bounce rate of an entire site is calculated by dividing the number of visitors who bounced after viewing a single page by the total number of visitors who entered the website. Using both calculations together can help a website owner compare the effectiveness of a single page to that of the entire site.

The lower the percentage, the more effective and relevant the site is judged to be. A high bounce rate is usually classified as one that exceeds 70%, but any site or page with a bounce rate over 50% is arguably in need of further research and development. In the case of a high bounce rate, site administrators can perform a series of changes in a trial and error fashion, and determine which adjustments to the content prove to be more appealing to visitors.