Bounce Rate

Companies marketing team spend a lot of time and resources on driving traffic to their sites, but once this is complete the process is far from over. Its important for companies to monitor the bounce rate, once the potential customer has landed on their page. “Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions” (Google, 2016). This means that bounce rate counts how many times someone lands on the page and leaves without going beyond that landing page.

Monitoring bounce rate begins by setting up proper analytics tools so the company can monitor their visitor’s activity on the site. Once a company has formulated their bounce rate they must identify the significance of the metric. Companies must base this decision on industry standards as well as the goal of the marketing team. 

“Most websites will see bounce rates fall somewhere between 26% and 70%” (Peyton, 2014). This is a large basis for a company, which clarifies the importance of formulating a basis rate that becomes the companies beginning goal. This will simply be the beginning goal because as the team has more historical data they may be able to identify new information that may result in adjustments to this goal. 

If the marketing team begins to see a trend that the bounce rate is higher then their desired goal there are a couple different changes that can be made. Changes that can be made are delivering on customer expectations, improve brand storytelling, increasing social presences, and improving web page design (Hartwig, 2013). All of these improvements focus on capturing and maintaining the customers attention. Making pages easier to access, easier to navigate, and interesting will be crucial in lowering the bounce rate. 

Bounce rate can be important in the decision making process but is more important for the marketing team in identifying if their web page or marketing campaign needs improvement. A high bounce rate can point to a couple different issues. The first area for the marketing team to analyze would be the web page. They will have to identify if it has too much or too little information, if it is difficult to navigate, or if it has an unappealing look to it. The second area that the marketing team can peer into is if the web page does not match the message being sent by the marketing campaign. The marketing team could potentially have created a marketing campaign that is attention grabbing and enticing for the target market. But if this campaign does not match the message that is being seen by viewers on the web site it can contradict the message that drew the attention of the target market. 

Overall, bounce rate is an important metric for companies to monitor. This will not be company’s number one metric in terms of importance but will help with the evolution of both marketing campaigns and web pages. Identifying industry standards in this metric will help build a foundation for initial goals that companies can build on until they formulate an idea for what their bounce rate should be for them. Bounce rate is not a perfect science so what is a high rate for some companies may be the ideal goal for other companies.

References 

Bounce Rate. (n.d.). Retrieved October 18, 2016, from

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009409?hl=en

Hartwig, E. (2013, November 22). How to Lower Your Site's Bounce Rate. Retrieved

October 18, 2016, from http://mashable.com/2013/11/22/bounce-rate-metric/#AGIKBEsmqkqJ

Peyton, J. (2014, February 25). What's the Average Bounce Rate for a Website?

Retrieved October 18, 2016, from http://www.gorocketfuel.com/the-rocket-   blog/whats-the-average-bounce-rate-in-google-analytics/