Bounce Rate Google Analytics is a marketing measure that is widely overlooked. This article is going to try to clear it up at any level. From the simplest description of what a bounce rate is and how it impacts SEO and what the bounce rate might be, we’re going to touch it all. We’re also going to get to the basic and important issue of, “What can I do with this knowledge? “To make bounce rates google analytics more workable for marketing practitioners.
If you are an SEO expert, a conversion optimization specialist, a UX artist, a marketing analyst, or someone else who operates on a website and looks at the details, you’ll get something from this guide.
BOUNCE RATES GOOGLE ANALYTICS- AN OVERVIEW
Bounce ratings (often mistaken with exit rates) have been used in web analytics. In the simplest context, the bounce rate reflects the number of visitors joining and exiting the site, as opposed to sitting on the site and engaging with it substantively.
People use bounce rates as a measure of performance and page quality. The hypothesis (but again not always accurate) is that a high bounce rate is poor and that a low bounce rate is nice. This is, of course, a condensed truth. A high bounce rate on the customer service page may mean that the user has found a solution to their problem and has rebounded successfully. A high bounce rate on the landing page with a lot of paying transaction could be a sign that you should improve it to get more traffic.
In any case, bounce rates are extremely descriptive, commonly used and widespread, and are of great interest to a site analyst. This guide would delve into basic concepts and use bounce rate scenarios for marketing, architecture, SEO, and more. Bounce rate is a standard and commonly used metric for digital analytics and web traffic measurement. Although most people use it as a form of a performance measure, its true meaning is often mistaken.
WHAT IS THE TRUE AND ACTUAL MEANING OF BOUNCE RATE?
The basic definition of bounce rate is relatively simple: the number of visits to a given website who move away from the platform after just one page has been visited. So, anyone joins the web from any source (email, ad, social media) and exits the site without visiting the other sections. It makes perfect sense. However, this is not completely true. A bounce in most analytics programmes, including Google Analytics, is where a customer exits without engaging with the site. Since you can customise analytics events that arise on a website (such as watching a video or engaging with a slider), you might have a guest that just hits one page and then exits – however it may not be referred to as a bounce.
Though it will be smart to set up event monitoring to help users connect with on-page features. When you bring up an event in Google Analytics, you can select a non-interactive or interactive event. If the event is interactive, initiating the session would transform the session into a non-bounce session – even if the user leaves the page directly after that. In any scenario, just understand: a bounce in Google Analytics is not a visit with a single page load, but instead a visit with a single interaction hit. Another page view may affect the bounce rate, but an incident which has not been set to non-Interactive may also affect the bounce rate.
That’s why it’s so essential to do a Google Analytics Health Check so that anytime you see a site with a 0 per cent or 100 per cent bounce rate, you know that something is dodgy and that something typically does have to do with two page views being shot, or an interactive event hit getting released.
WHAT IS A GOOD BOUNCE RATE FOR GOOGLE ANALYTICS?
This is among the most often questionnaire items about bounce rates, but the fact is, there’s simply no clear baseline for calculating good and poor bounce rates. A reasonable bounce rate can depend on the following:
- Your business
- If your site is an e-commerce or a lead gen
- Theme/Intent of the page
- Seasonal variation
- And a lot, a lot more
In a very broad way, a lower bounce rate (say, 40-60 per cent, but also arbitrary) is optimal. But consider the following:
You’re operating a non-profit website where the aim is to get people to call. When anyone loads a website, identifies a piece of contact information, and then dials the number on their phone, and Analytics bounce is called. But they’re considered a win for your company. That’s where the drawbacks of calculating the bounce rate come into play. It’s just a measure of what Analytics should measure.
WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU KNOW YOUR BOUNCE RATE?
Knowing the bounce rate helps you to make better choices about content promotion, paying purchase, SEO, and CRO or user interface. You will use this as a metric to monitor whether or not the improvements are favourable or unfavourable.
As I said, a high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad thing. In addition, even though you’ve decided that a lower bounce rate on a website is a positive thing, it doesn’t imply that lowering it is necessarily advantageous. E.g., you might perform an A/B test where converts and sales decrease, but your bounce rate drops away as well. Are you expected to apply the variation? No, since the metrics that count are those that fund bills, not engagement metrics like bounce rates.
Bounce rates are a good surrogate indicator for success. They’re best for discovering the opportunity zones. But it’s a “micro-conversion” – essentially, you shouldn’t be optimising just to reduce the bounce rate on a website. It can be a deceptive measure for conversion optimisation.
WHAT ARE SOME COMMON BOUNCE RATE PROBLEMS?
- EXTREMELY LOW BOUNCE RATES:
The near your bounce rate is to zero, the more probable it is to be incorrect. That may sound mean, and it’s almost wholly applicable. Bounce rates reaching zero typically entail one of two things:
- Many occurrences of analytics code on a single page
- Interaction events that shoot when the page is loaded
In the presence of multi-Analytics codes, you send two pageview impacts to Analytics. The very first time the code is on, the session begins. The second time the code is on, it gives a second site view to Analytics. It would be as if the client had reopened the website. On the other side, if you do have an event that will begin as early as the page loads, the regular Google Analytics code will launch a session, so the program will begin at the same time which will automatically preclude the session from rebounding, even if the client has no further contact with the site.
- DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BOUNCE RATE AND EXIT RATES:
If you dive far enough into the “Behaviour” segment of Analytics, you are likely to find a statistic called exit rate. While the exit rate is comparable to the bounce rate, it is two distinct metrics. Exit rate is the number of page views where a page was the last page the consumer encountered. Bounce rate is the number of experiences that had just one-page view.
- DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BOUNCE RATE AND POGO STICKING:
This is a popular misconception, but it’s an untrue misconception. Google (and other search engines) do not use the bounce rate of the site to determine rankings. For one instance, not every blog has Analytics enabled because there will be no means for Google to even recognize what the conversion rates are for those pages and other search engines will not have access to that info.
Today, what could be (and possibly is) accurate is that Google (and probably other search engines) might be able to calculate what’s called pogo-sticking. Pogo sticking is identical to bouncing except that only one page is accessed by the user. The distinction is that pogo-sticking implies that the user has returned to the search engines result page they come from, and usually very rapidly. While more difficult to quantify, pogo-sticking is a major concern, as it implies that there is something off-putting or unpleasant about the platform.
CONCLUSION:
Bounce rate Google analytics is frequently mistaken, but with some proper strategic thinking and technological execution, you can use it to explain the success of your website at a very detailed level. Only spend time thinking about what a positive website engagement is for you, and then start organising Google Analytics activities to map them. If you have things in order, you can use the bounce rate in Google Analytics as a kind of interaction metric to analyse landing page success and more.
We hope this guide will help you in every aspect of understanding bounce rate google analytics and how it impacts your site and progress.