Bounce rate

One page, then gone

Somebody lands on your site, looks at the page they landed on, and leaves without going anywhere else. That visit is a bounce. Bounce rate is the share of your visits that ended that way.

The catch sits inside the phrase "anywhere else." What counts as going somewhere is whatever your site was set up to notice. If a tap on your phone number is tracked, the visitor who called you is not a bounce. If nobody ever wired that up, the same visitor is filed as one, and your report quietly tells you a customer left unimpressed while that customer is on the phone with you.

Tools also disagree on the arithmetic. Some count any visit that touched a single page. Others treat a visit as engaged once it passes a set number of seconds or fires a tracked event, and call everything else a bounce. So the number is comparable to your own history in your own tool, and to nothing else, least of all a figure somebody posted online.

When a bounce is fine and when it is not

A high bounce rate on a page whose whole job is to answer one thing is not a problem. Holiday hours, a price list, a parking map, a phone number: the visitor got what they came for and closed the tab. That is the page succeeding.

We publish more than 50 free tools at kellywm.com/tools with no email wall, and a good number of them bounce hard by design. Somebody runs a figure, writes it down, and gets back to work. Nobody involved is disappointed.

It reads differently when the page was supposed to start something. A service page where nobody ever clicks through to the quote form. An ad landing page people leave in seconds. A city page that never sends a soul to the contact page. Those bounces are a message, and the message is usually one of three things: the page was slow to become useful, it answered a different question than the one that was typed, or it gave the visitor nothing obvious to do next.

The other thing worth pulling apart is where the visit came from. A bounce from somebody who searched your business name means something very different than a bounce from an ad click you paid for, and on most sites the two are sitting inside the same average, canceling each other out.

Before rebuilding anything, find out what your number is actually counting, which is where our analytics and conversion work tends to start.

Bounce rate next to the numbers that replaced it

Most reporting has moved toward engaged sessions and conversion rate, which describe what a visitor did rather than what they failed to do. That is a better default. Bounce rate still earns its keep as a tripwire: when one landing page jumps overnight while the rest of the site holds steady, something on that page broke, and you now know which page to open first.

One practical warning about comparing across time. If somebody adds tracking for phone taps, chat opens, or scroll depth to a site that never had it, the bounce rate will drop the following week and nothing about the site itself will have changed. Write the date of that change down somewhere, because six months later it is going to look like a win.