Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the share of visitors who arrive, look at one page and leave again without doing anything else. That means no second page, no button pressed and no form sent, which is why the number feels so blunt. If a hundred people land on your price page and sixty go straight back to Google, your bounce rate is sixty per cent.

One warning before you compare your number with anybody else's, because the tools no longer count this the same way. Google Analytics 4 measures engaged sessions instead, so a visitor who reads for a full minute and then leaves is no longer a bounce. Older tools counted that same person as one. A figure from one tool therefore means nothing beside a figure from another. The only fair comparison is your own site with itself, month by month.

Two causes explain most of the high numbers we see, and the first is a slow page on a cheap phone. Owners test the site on a new handset over office wifi, so everything feels quick. Their customer, though, opens the same page on a four-year-old Android on mobile data, waits five seconds and gives up. Borrow a cheap phone and try it in the street, because it is the fastest check in marketing. The second cause is the wrong audience, since an advert or a search word that promises one thing and drops people on a page about something else sends them away in seconds. Look at the bounce rate for each source rather than for the whole site, as one bad advert spoils a healthy average.

Sometimes a high bounce rate is perfectly fine. A page that gives opening hours, a phone number or one clear answer has done its job when the visitor reads it and leaves. That person may well have called you from the pavement outside. So before you rebuild anything, check whether the phone number was tapped and how long people stayed, since those two numbers usually tell the truth better than the bounce.

Linkysoft looks at the bounce rate of the landing page and the advert feeding it together, because fixing one without the other rarely works. When the page itself is at fault we treat it as a website design job, and when the traffic is at fault it belongs to digital marketing. Linkysoft usually starts there, since better visitors cost less than a new design.