Guess what? I have stopped paying super close attention to my blog’s bounce rate.
Why? The short answer: because I don’t always see a bounce as a bad thing.
Websites that are primarily blogs tend to have a high high average bounce rate because people come for one specific article.
If you have an eCommerce website or similar, you should be working on lowering your bounce rate. This post is directed to bloggers.
According to hubspot, a realistic bounce rate for the average blog a bounce rate is 70-95%. Parachute designs describes blog’s bounce rates even further:
Due to the nature of blogs and how information is commonly shared across social media streams and back linking, it is more natural for visitors to land on a blog article page and then leave once they have finished reading. In this scenario visitors are far less likely to scan through archives of older articles, which leaves the bounce rate significantly higher than any other common scenario.
Knowing what a typical bounce rate is for your site will help you set realistic goals. No use fretting over something that is actually performing really well.
When someone visits your blog and explores your site, reads a few posts, checks out your about page, that is great! This visitor is not counted as a “bounce”.
Is a “bounce” a bad thing?
Not every visitor is going to behave the same as the example above, but that does not make it an unsuccessful visit. Here are some instances where a “bounce” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, many of these “bounces” are doing exactly what you want them to do.
- Sarah found your blog through a pin on Pinterest. She read that entire article and loved it. She the pinned it herself and even tweeted about how awesome it was. That is great! But, this visit is counted as a bounce.
- Bob landed on one of your posts recommending one of your favorite products – that product was an affiliate link. He was impressed with your description of the product and left your blog through one of your affiliate links. He ended up making a purchase and you got a kickback for the sale. You made money off of this visit. But, he is still counted as a bounce.
- Madison follows you on Feedly. Almost every time you post a new article, she comes over and reads that blog post. She doesn’t need to go to a different page every time she comes to your site because she’s there three times a week. She’s already looked at the majority of the pages on your blog. But, when she comes to read your new post, she is still counted as a bounce.
- Stephanie found one of your recipe’s on Pinterest while making her weekly meal plan. It looked delicious so she wrote down the ingredients for her shopping list and pinned the article to come back to it later in the week. That visit was a bounce. On Thursday, she opened the Pin and followed your instructions for the recipe. She closed the tab when she was done. This visit was also counted as a bounce. Her family loved the meal and they added it to their list of favorites. Since she like that recipe, she decided to follow you on Pinterest and now tries several of your recipes.
See where I’m going here? A “bounce” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That is why I don’t pay very much attention to bounce rate. I look at other elements on Google Analytics and other forms of engagement.
Do you have a really high or really low bounce rate?
If you’re a blogger and have a bounce rate that is under 20% or over 95%, there is a good chance your Google Analytics is not installed correctly on your site. Don’t get too excited or too depressed yet.
Those type of numbers are frequently a sign that you have installed the tracking code wrong or you have duplicate analytics codes running on your site. A lot of bloggers have Google Analytics installed more than one time, without realizing they did it. They followed an awesome tutorial like mine on how to install Google Analtyics on a WordPress blog and then a month later they installed a Google Analytics plugin and it automatically added the code to their site. There’s two installations, causing your analytics to report inaccurate statistics.
To check to see if you have it installed more than once, bring open your blog in your favorite browser. Navigate to the developer tools section of the browser and click Page Source (Firefox) or View Source (Chrome).
Search (using control F) for “analytics” and make sure you only have one Google Analytics script showing up!
How to lower your bounce rate
If you do want to lower your bounce rate, you can check out these articles:
- Decrease your website bounce rate – hubspot.com
- How to reduce your blog bounce rate – xomisse.com
- 7 ways to reduce your bounce rate – lifecouldbeadreamblog.com
Seriously though, don’t sweat your blog’s bounce rate. You’re doing a great job blogging, even if you have a high bounce rate.
Wonderful article. I’m a new blogger and my bounce rate hovers around 69-72. It has been driving me crazy and making me second guess myself but I appreciated your insight. It’s important to keep a balanced perspective. Thanks for your supportive words.
I think if the Bounce Rate is 50-70 % then it is ok. This article helps a lot for get rid of bounce rate worry.
Thanks Mina. I was just thinking about bounce rate again this morning. Really, most of the time I am a-okay with my bounce rate. 🙂
This is by far the best blog I have read on bounce rate. I used to worry sick. I have been analyzing and doing a lot of research. Well, that was how I stumbled on your blog (2 years after you wrote the article, lol) – thanks to Google.
Many of the posts doing well on my blog are lyrics. People go to Google to type the song and put – lyrics- in front. They want to get it as quickly as possible and once they are done, they are out. I would not count that as entirely bad. If I had only lyrics on my blog, I would say that my bounce rate would be as high as 90% or more.
Thankfully, other feminine articles have helped me achieve a good balance so I fall in between 65 and 85.
Thank you for this article once again.
Between 65-85 bounce sounds great too me! Glad you can stop worrying now. Take care!
Thanks for this! As someone who doesn’t really sweat about my high bounce rate, but at the same time does consider what it means for my blog, this is really helpful!
Glad it gave you some good insights! Also glad you don’t sweat it too often. 🙂 Happy blogging!
Thank you for this valuable article…………………..
This has changed my perspective of how I viewed the bounce rates of my blog
http://www.newsphases.com
Thank you – it’s so refreshing to see a twist on the whole bounce rate debate. Certainly sharing this to Twitter (:
Kristie you are right that for bloggers, a high bounce rate does not necessarily mean that the visitor has bounced. If a visitor comes to your page, reads it and then leaves, although Analytics count it as a bounce but in actual the purpose is served.
However, it is not a complete picture. You actually need to know how much percentage of people actually bounced off your page without reading your article. For this, there is a small line of code you need to add to your GA tracking code in which you can define a length of stay (30 secs, 1 minute etc.) after which it will not be counted as a bounce.
If you google it with keywords “adjust bounce rate for blogs”, I am sure you can find good articles on that. I had nearly 80% bounce rate (as you said in your article) but then after this adjustment, I am now down to 15%. This means that the 15% are still bouncing off without reading anything. A good information to hand.
Hope this helps and apologies for a long comment. I thought it might help someone.
This is probably the best blog about bounce rates that I’ve read for a long time. A bounce rate, in my opinion, is not a bad thing–but a hidden way to harness your website’s power. Here are some situations, where I think, that a higher bounce rate can be an indicator of your website’s success:
1. Higher mobile bounce rate: Often, this means that your website is mobile-friendly. If people are calling your business from your mobile website, your bounce rate can be anywhere from 10 to 15% higher.
2. Blog pages can have a higher bounce rate, but you can use these pages to help your conversion rate. By putting a simple call-to-action button or a form, you can easily leverage that higher bounce rate to help your conversion rate.
3. If you are launching an email campaign or some sort of “direct traffic” campaign, your bounce rate might go up for a little bit. Any surge in traffic, which is a success in my opinion, will naturally have a slightly higher bounce rate from the get go.
Love your additions and thoughts on bounce rate George! Success is all in the eyes of the beholder I guess.
Great reminder that our stats are just one element of our overall success and can’t possibly measure everything. My bounce rate is always on the higher end and I had been worried about it until someone pointed out that it may just mean people are finding exactly what they want on my site and don’t need to go searching for it. However, a high bounce rate and a short amount of time on site would be something I would worry about. Thank you xo
Actually, if you have a high bounce rate, you probably are going to naturally have shorter amount of time on your site. Google can not track the amount of time someone spends on your site unless they engage with it.
And here I was super worried over my bounce rate! 🙂 Thank you for the insights, it makes much more sense now, and it also makes me realize how silly it is for it even to be a such thing. A page view is a page view and just should be counted as such. 🙂
Bounce rate is a good metric for some types of websites to track. Hopefully readers do visit more than just one page, but if they don’t, it’s not always a bad thing. Glad you’re not going to be super worried anymore.
I think this is a really good point but at the same time think that your bounce rate can tell you things…. I come from the perspective of making money through working with brands and a lower bounce rate is a great engagement metric to show brands that your blog is sticky and your readers are engaged. That said, no one metric tells you everything and you should be looking at them together. If you have a high bounce rate and low engagement metrics in other ways (comments, shares, sign ups etc…) or just one or two posts driving all your traffic then you need to reassess your strategy in my opinion.
I run a course on this and am going to share this post with my students when we get to this module as I think it’s good food for thought!
Very true, you shouldn’t let only 1 metric dictate your view. Thanks for sharing with your class. Obviously, it is good to improve your bounce rate. I just see so many bloggers get discouraged about their bounce rates that I thought it would be good to point out that a bounce isn’t always a bad thing.
I completely agree with you Kristie, that we should not worry much about bounce rate unless we have a huge ecommerce site. The example you gave are excellent. Very informative and helpful post.
Thanks Dina!
I have already high bounce Kristie. I’m still worry about it. And i don’t know for sure which one is the best way to solve it. *sigh
But It is good article, i pin it.
I’m not sure that your Google Analytics is installed correctly. It looks like you’re using a plugin?
You’re right. I’m using plugin to place Google Analytics code, seo yoast. What’s your suggestion? actually I’m new to use that. 🙁
This was a great article and really important. I blogged for over a year before someone told me I had analytics installed twice. Man, was that discouraging. My pageviews were actually half of what I thought they were for over a year. It took a long time for me to be ok with that super low number. Visiting from #sitsblogging !
That would be discouraging, but at least you’re getting more accurate results now!
This is such a great post! I have been worried because my bounce rate climbed to about 85% when it was 75% a few months ago. It makes sense though since Pinterest has grown as a source of traffic. Thanks for the encouragement!
Pinterest definitely makes higher bounce rates! Especially since us bloggers like to make sure the pin takes you to the right post. You’re doing great! Mine averages 85% too.
What an awesome post! So informative!
I’ve struggled with this whole bounce rate thing because mine is so low (15%) but when I check, it’s only installed once. It’s so weird. Plus I know it’s supposed to be in the head of the page but when I put it in the head, it doesn’t track all my pages but in the footer it tracks all my pages. It’s so weird. I know something is screwed up but I’ve given up on trying to fix it.
Pinning this to my Deliberate BLOGGING board. I like that whole bit on how to check your source code… nifty!
Wishing you a lovely weekend.
xoxo
Hmm, that’s odd. It should be able to track all of your pages whether you put it in the head or the footer. Are you using the Genesis header/footer boxes to upload?
Maybe you are just super lucky and have a low bounce rate!
Have you posted your video? I would love to see it, because I think I have multiple scripts and I don’t know what to do! Thanks Kristie for this great tutorial!
Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZGzLzmEEIg
Whenever I view my Google Analytics data, I would always worry about my high bounce rate; I didn’t know if I was doing okay with my blog. After reading your take on it, I’m now glad to know that my percentage falls within the realistic average blog rate (it’s usually between 50%-ish and 70%-ish)! 🙂 Thanks for explaining how bounce rates should look like for bloggers. It definitely helps A LOT!
50 – 70 % is awesome! Mine’s not that great. You’re doing awesome.