Google Analytics Bounce Rate

Google Analytics Bounce Rate

“Bounce” occurs when someone visits your websites and leaves without interacting or without clicking any additional page on your website. Google Analytics Bounce Rate shows you the percentage of visitors who bounces off from your website.

If you are someone who is looking to increase the traffic of the website or to increase the engagement of the audience on your website or blog, then “Bounce Rate” is the factor that is stopping you from doing that.

The concept of “Bounce Rate” is so important that it can shape the growth as well as the revenue of your website. Quick Fact: “Bounce Rate” somehow affect your website ranking on Google. You may be wondering that “why my website or blog is not doing well even though I have put engaging & quality content”. Well in this post we will dig up “Bounce Rate” and we will find the reason behind this. We will make sure that by the end of the post you will get a crystal clear idea of what is “Google Analytics Bounce Rate”.

In this post, we will see the below-mentioned points in detail & a brief explanation.

• What is Bounce Rate in Google Analytics & why does it matter?
• How does the Bounce Rate work on a real website?
• What is Google Analytics & How does Google calculates the Bounce Rate of your website?

What is Bounce Rate in Google Analytics & why does it matter?

Bounce Rate according to Google is defined as single-page sessions or visitors who visits only the landing page and exit the website divided by all sessions or all the visits on your website, or we can call as a percentage of all sessions in your site in which users has viewed only single page of your site and triggered an only single request to the Analytics server.

Well, that was some fancy robot talk. Too technical right! Let me simply put that.

A “Bounce” occurs when someone visits your websites and leaves without interacting or without even clicking any additional page on your website. A “Bounce Rate” shows you the percentage of the visitors who bounces off from your website.

A “Bounce Rate” is a unit to measure the percentage of people who lands on your websites and do completely nothing. So they don’t click on any links or “read more” button or anything. A user or visitor bounces off when nothing is exciting or no engagement with the landing or main page of the website and thus visit often ends with a single page resulting in bounce rate. Well, there may be several reasons for bouncing off from the website. We will look at each of them in the latter part of the post.

One thing is certain that the bounce rate defines the quality of your website or I can say the quality of the audience. By the quality of the audience I mean whether the audience fits properly into the purpose of your site.

©insightwhale.com

Well, this could be the simplest formula to express “Bounce Rate”. I’m sure by now you must have this question that “why does bounce rate matters”?

Look at the below image:

©webfx.com

Bounce Rate is the 4th most important factor in website ranking. As you can see it is more important than your content length or your website security. So if you are starting up or if you already have any website or blog then you must know “Bounce Rate”.

So let’s see in detail about the types of bounce rate & practical example of how “Bounce Rate” actually works.

How does the Bounce Rate work on a real website?

Let’s take an example of a website that is having a landing page. Additionally, it has some links to other pages and some sections which redirect you to other pages of the website.

Let me tell you one strange fact about Google. When the visitor visits your website and if he doesn’t click on any sections or if he exits the website by just looking at the landing page then that is also considered as “Bounce” by Google Analytics. By saying landing page I mean the main interface or main page of your website. Well, there could be tons of reasons for this. Let’s look at all the reasons that could be preventing your website from growing up.

• One reason could be that visitors have found already what they are looking for on your landing page of the website. So there is no need to further lookup on your website.
• The quality of your website is not that good and so nothing is inviting them to engage with.
• Your audience doesn’t match with the purpose of your website and so they won’t engage with your website.
• Maybe the loading time of your website pages is slow and that’s a huge factor. You may have heard that the average span time of any human is 7s. I mean in 7s they have already figured out if they can find the relevant information on your website or not that they are looking for.

But the bounce rate of your website and whether it is good or bad highly depends on the purpose of the page. If the purpose of your page is only providing the information or addresses, in that case, the bounce rate is not a bad thing. But of course, if you assuming the visitors to subscribe to your channel or wishing them to visit or read more about the articles or products on a different page then no doubt you have to consider the “Bounce Rate”.

But it isn’t surprising if someone wants to read only the article or find what the product is about or wants to know the address then it’s certain that the visitor will close the tab or main page of your website after they are done reading. Keep in mind that even in this case a trigger is not sent to Google Analytics Server (we will talk about “Google Analytics Server” in the later section of the post) and so eventually it will be considered as “Bounce”.

What is Google Analytics & How does Google calculates Bounce Rates of your website?

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool provided by Google to help you analyze and manage website traffic

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool provided by Google to help you analyze and manage website traffic. For any company or start-ups, the website is the central hub of all digital traffics and so if you haven’t set up your Google Analytics account then do it ASAP. More than 50 Million websites around the world use this tool to effectively manage their website traffic.

Let me simply tell you how Google Analytics works. The below definition is more than sufficient for a beginner to start with Google Analytics. We are already aware that everything on the internet works with some code written in the back-end.

Well, Google Analytics also uses certain lines of code. Google Analytics has put several Lines of tracking code into the code of your website. The job of this code is to record various activities of your users or the audience along with some general information or attributes such as Gender, Age & Interests. After collecting all this necessary information it sends all this data to the GA (Google Analytics) the server once the visitor’s exit the user website.

Now Google Analytics comes into the picture. Next Google Analytics aggregates all these data collected from your website in multiple ways.

Below are the primary ways of how Google Analytics aggregates the data.

• Event level – (button clicks, Video views, Subscribe buttons, etc).
• User-level – (related to the actions by a specific user).
• Page view level – (each page the visitor visited).
• Session level – (each visit).

How does Google calculate the bounce rate of your website? According to Google, the bounce rate is calculated in the following manner: It collects all the sessions where the visitor has visited only a single page and then divides it by all the sessions.

Let’s say if the daily traffic of your website is 1000 visitors. Now assume that 20% of your audience is only visiting the landing page or main page of your website. Here 1000 will be our all sessions and 200 (20 % of 1000) will be our session with a single page visited.

Bounce rate = (200 / 1000) * 100% = 20% will be the bounce rate.

So in this post, we have seen “Google Analytics & Bounce rate”.

I hope by now I have cleared all your doubts & in the next post, we will look at some of the advanced features of “Google Analytics” & will see how you can improve website ranking as well as the bounce rate of your website.

Thank you guys for reading the post.