When bounce rates lie

I was just looking at my company’s bounce rate and was pretty horrified to see that it was over 70%, which means that 70% of the people visiting our site leave again without moving to another page. Which means we’re not engaging them or enticing them to click any further into our site. All in all, this would result in a pretty poor conversion rate.

So I had a bit of a deeper look and saw that our home page bounce rate isn’t too bad… and our 2nd most popular page, our portfolio page, has a fantastic bounce rate with hardly anyone leaving and most people clicking through to read about a project.

So why the shocking overall average?

Well because we write a lot of blog posts and support articles, designed to come up in Google and give people help and advice. And so if someone is looking for “how do I know how many visitors my website gets?” and lands on our site on that page, they can read our article about stats, and then click off and go on their marry way with, hopefully, their questions answered. They weren’t ever looking for a web developer and we haven’t lost any business. But overall, they put a real dent in our average bounce rate because they give pages like that a 90+% score.

So that’s why it’s important to look at your bounce rate – but look at it indepth and understand what’s really going on.