The bounce rate is an important metric for webmasters. It records the behaviour of those visitors who make a single page request within one session on a website. A bounce is therefore a short interaction that in the vast majority of cases produces no conversion.

Such behaviour suggests that the website offers no value for that particular visitor. Websites where the majority of visitors leave again after the initial visit accordingly have a high bounce rate. For the webmaster that means the content of the page needs optimising.

A low bounce rate, by contrast, indicates that a large share of visitors engages with the content more deeply. The visitor only leaves the site after having visited several subpages.

The bounce rate is expressed as a percentage:

number of visitors with only one page view / total number of visitors * 100 = bounce rate in per cent

Bounce rate in web analytics

Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Matomo analyse the traffic and calculate the bounce rate. For a webmaster the figure is an excellent indicator, because it says something about the relevance of the content for their audience. General conclusions can be:

• the target audience does not feel addressed
• title and meta tags do not correspond with the content of a page

In a wider sense the value can also point at technical faults. A simple example: if a landing page sets a wrong link to the destination, or none at all, the bounce rate of the incoming visits is very high. A value well above 90 % would be expected there.

Bounce rate vs. visitor session

For every visitor who accesses a website, Google Analytics starts a session. The time window of that session is 30 minutes. The session duration is the time a visitor spends between the first and the last page view. A session counts as ended when more than 30 minutes pass between two consecutive page views. It makes no difference whether the visitor moved several times on the same subpage or between two different subpages. The rule is: at least 2 consecutive page views are needed to measure a session duration.

For a session that consists of only one impression, no session duration can be measured. The duration is therefore 0 seconds and the visitor counts as bounced, even if the actual stay on the website lasted much longer. Because of these technical limitations, what the visitor perceived during that single view cannot be taken into account.

The important point: a dwell time greater than 0 seconds has a positive effect on the bounce rate.

The influence of the bounce rate on SEO

Google recommends keeping the bounce rate in view for OnPage optimization at all times. That is only logical, since the resulting optimisation potential is without doubt enormous. A direct influence on search rankings is not proven and is disputed. Considering the return-to-SERP rate, however, it stands to reason that visitor behaviour is weighted in some form. Visitors bouncing should be avoided.

Bounce rate and return-to-SERP rate

The return-to-SERP rate is an indicator that reflects the search behaviour of a visitor on Google or other search engines. What is measured is how often, and from which page, a visitor returns to the search results after clicking a result. That value gives Google important clues and raises the following questions:

• Is the visitor satisfied with the search result?
• Are the pages they returned from topically relevant for this search?

Whoever clicks a result on Google and then decides to return to the search shows their lack of interest in that result. It would be reasonable for Google to take repeated disinterest into account in future rankings. So anyone recording a high bounce rate from Google referrers is well advised to fix that quickly. Otherwise a poor Google ranking may be the consequence.

A return to SERP can therefore be interpreted by Google as follows:

• The search result does not deliver what was wanted, so the visitor refines the search with other keywords.
• The search result does not deliver what was wanted, so the visitor keeps looking on other websites.

In both cases the visitor produces only one page view. It is assumed that the visitor left the page straight away. Google reads that as a negative signal.

Not every kind of traffic is good traffic

A typical SEO mistake many webmasters make: they set misleading meta information. Meta title and description are shown on Google and tempt visitors to open an entry. A visitor won through Google is always a disappointed visitor, however, when they find different information on the website than what they were promised in the search results.

That visitor will leave the website again and most likely never come back. As a rule, meta information always has to reflect the content of a page truthfully. A website has to convince through its content alone, and clickbait has to be avoided. A briefly inflated click rate is worth nothing if the visitors won bounce straight away.

What is a good bounce rate?

A value between 25 and 40 per cent is rated as very good and is usually reserved for market leaders in contested topics. Values between 40 and 55 per cent are the normal case. A value of 70 per cent or more, by contrast, is a bad sign: there is usually urgent work to do.

These figures are of course only a rule of thumb. Depending on the goal a page pursues, the norm can differ considerably. A single page without subpages has a very high value by definition - there is no reason for a visitor to move on within one and the same page.

Reasons for a bounce rate that is too high

Missing interaction on a website is a clear warning sign. The reasons are many; typical factors are:

• faulty tracking
• poor design
• insufficient or missing mobile responsiveness
• incompatibility with certain browsers
• poor usability and user experience
• weak meta title and description
• slow loading times
• broken links from the landing page to the subpages
• poorly implemented semantics
• misleading keywords
• misleading advertising or ads
• too much advertising

A tip: mobile traffic keeps getting more important. Mobile responsiveness often leaves a lot to be desired, especially on older websites. Yet the attention span of a mobile user is considerably shorter. Visitors have to be engaged even faster, because the first impression of a page is often the decisive one.

How to improve your bounce rate

Taking the factors listed above into account encourages more interaction and therefore a lower bounce rate. As mentioned, consistent OnPage optimization is of outstanding importance here as well.

SEO work is very time-consuming, though. Through the surfbar, eBesucher offers a feature that improves the bounce rate. With the visitor session a visitor can visit a page several times in a row. The visitor session is available to every advertiser. On top of that you can advertise several subpages that are shown to one visitor one after another.