Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who viewed one page and left.
Imagine a visitor lands on your homepage and reads two articles before leaving. This visitor did not “bounce” because they viewed multiple pages. This would make your bounce rate 0%.
Now imagine a second visitor arrives on the homepage and leaves without viewing any other pages. This would qualify as a “bounce,” and your bounce rate would increase to 50% since half of your visitors left after viewing one page.
Bounce rate is more useful for some types of sites than others but serves as a decent health check for most websites.
For instance, if you see your bounce rate increase suddenly, this could be a sign that there’s a technical glitch affecting visitors. This can be checked for individual pages and page types as well.
If your bounce rate is high (80% or higher), this doesn’t mean visitors aren’t enjoying your site. For blogs, in particular, it’s common for visitors to read one post, find what they need, and leave without viewing more pages. It’s important to see bounce rate for exactly what it is and nothing more: the percentage of one-page visits.
You can also see the bounce rate for each referrer, and this will give you a clearer picture of the engagement level you’re getting.
For example, you may find visitors from search engines bounce frequently, but loyal followers from your social channels are less likely to bounce.
If you’re transitioning from Google Analytics, you will notice that the bounce rate in Independent Analytics may be higher. This happens because we calculate bounce rate strictly as the percentage of one-page sessions.
Most people aren’t aware of this, but Google Analytics doesn’t calculate bounce rate as the number of single-page sessions; it uses the number of sessions with a single request to their server. This means they also include other events. For example, if you have a social sharing plugin with Google Analytics integration, it likely fires an event when someone clicks a button, and this is counted towards bounce rate.
Counting events as if they are page views has the effect of artificially lowering your bounce rate, and the effect can be significant if you have a lot of events firing on your site. It also makes bounce rate very confusing.
For instance, your bounce rate could be a percentage of people who viewed one page, didn’t click a share button, didn’t optin to your newsletter, or didn’t add an item to the cart. This is confusing, not to mention impossible to optimize for. If your bounce rate lowers, you won’t know if it’s because visitors are viewing more pages or clicking the Add to Cart button more.
For these reasons, our bounce rate is a simple calculation of single-page sessions / total sessions.
If you’re wondering if your site’s bounce rate is healthy, we have a blog post about outlining what a good bounce rate is and how to optimize it.
