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What is the Bounce Rate and Why is it Important?
Bounce Rate and Business
Every page on your website has metrics, and if you have Google Analytics set up on your pages, you’ll be able to view them. Some metrics, like “Bounce Rate”, are very useful when it comes to making decisions about how to improve your website’s performance to drive sales and increase traffic.
Here is everything you’ll need to know when it comes to understanding bounce rate, and how it affects your business.
Questions businesses ask the most about bounce rates
Frequently asked questions about bounce rate metrics:
WHAT IS BOUNCE RATE?
“Bounce Rate” shows how many times people come to your website, and then leave, without clicking on any of your pages. Every page has its own bounce rate.
WHAT DOES A HIGH BOUNCE RATE MEAN?
It means that people who are visiting your website aren’t interested enough to stay. Instead of contributing to your “through traffic” by clicking on another link on your page, they make your bounce rate higher, by leaving your site rather than exploring it.
WHY IS BOUNCE RATE IMPORTANT?
A page’s bounce rate helps to measure the quality of the page, in terms of how valuable it is to your visitors.
HOW DOES BOUNCE RATE AFFECT MY WEBSITE?
Pages that have a high bounce rate can decrease your search engine ranking on websites like Google. They can also prevent you from making the most out of your website by decreasing the number of leads your getting, or the number of sales you’re making.
Pro Tip : Google has an algorithm that helps it decide how to rank pages, by order of importance, when someone submits a Google search. One way Google determines how important your website should be is by determining how popular your pages are. If your visitors are consistently leaving your webpages right away, Google will rank your website lower then any competition you have, if that competitor’s web page statistics are better than yours. In that way, a high bounce rate could have a significant impact on your website’s success.
WHAT SHOULD MY BOUNCE RATE BE?
A bounce rate that is 40% or lower is great, no matter what industry you’re in. That would mean that more than half of the people visiting your page. However, in the auto industry (including Powersports and motorsports), the average bounce rate is a bit higher - about 52%. So, if you’re in the Powersports industry, you could consider a bounce rate of 45% or lower to be quite good.
How to use bounce rate to improve your business
Using Bounce Rate to build a better website for sales, leads, and business:
- Determine what your business goals are for your website. Maybe you’re trying to sell products online or maybe you’re using your website to generate leads.
- Identify the most important pages. If you’re selling products, the checkout page would be the most important page to you. If you’re trying to generate leads, the contact page might be the page you want most of your visitors to go to.
- Choose the pages on your website that have the highest bounce rate.
- Make sure these pages look visually appealing, load quickly on a smartphone, and don’t have content that is too long, boring, or too aggressively pitched from a sales perspective. Then, include a link to one or more of the pages that are most valuable to you (like your online store, or your contact page). It’s better to put the link near the top of your page.
- After you save your webpage, check back in with your Google Analytics three weeks later to compare the page’s new bounce rate to its old one. You may still need to make some tweaks, but you should see some improvement. Repeat steps 3-5 as often as needed!
Top 5 reasons for high bounce rates
- Slow page loading speed: A slow loading speed can happen for a number of reasons, but some of the biggest culprits are: having too many pictures, especially if they’re large or uncompressed, and having too much javascript or HTML5 animations.
- Pop-up advertisements: Pop-ups can be a great way to generate leads but they can also chase away your visitors. Make sure your pop-ups are timed so that they only show up after the visitor has had a chance to look around your page for 5-10 seconds.
- Too many links and advertisements: Pages that are cluttered with links, logos, products, and advertisements, look untrustworthy to potential customers.
- All of your best content is on one page: If your website has a page (like your homepage) that contains most, or all of the information a potential customer needs to know, that page will likely have a higher bounce rate.
- Your page is a “high bounce” page type: Some pages, like your contact page, can be expected to have a high bounce rate, because a lot of people will search on Google for your contact information, specifically, and will exit out of your site once they have it.
Top 5 Bounce Rate Statistics for Powersports and Motorsports business professionals
Bounce Rate Statistics that every business professional in Powersports should know:
- Websites that are solely focused on lead generation have a bounce rate between 30% and 55%.
- eCommerce and retail websites have a bounce rate of 20% to 45%
- Landing pages have a bounce rate between 60% and 90%
- Pages in the auto industry have a bounce rate of about 52%
- Visitors coming from social media websites have a bounce rate of 54% while visitors coming from Google search have a bounce rate of 37%
Marketing vocabulary for business professionals
Terms everyone in the Powersport and motorsport industry should be familiar with:
Bounce Rate: The rate at which visitors coming to your website, leave, without clicking any of your other pages.
Speed Optimization: The process of shrinking the size of your website files to make your webpages load faster.
Image Compression: The process of making an image’s file size smaller, so it takes less time to load, and takes up less of your website’s storage space.
SEO: Stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It is the process of tweaking a website’s content, code, and links, to help it rank more highly in Google’s search results.
SMM: Stands for “Social Media Management”. It is often confused with SEO but the two have nothing in common. SMM is the profession of managing a business’s social media pages.
Website Traffic: A term that refers to the number of visitors that come to your website. There are different types of website traffic, depending on how visitors arrive at your site.
Organic Traffic: Refers to visitors who come to your website by searching on Google and clicking on your website in their search results. Organic traffic comes from natural search results that haven’t been paid for. If you are paying to show up in search results, the visitors who click your paid advertisements are considered “paid traffic”. (see below)
Paid Traffic: Visitors who click your sponsored website link when it shows up in their search results after you have paid the search engine to advertise the link on your behalf.
