The bounce rate of a page is one of the most important metrics to consider when optimising your pages. But understanding how the bounce rate of a page compares to that of another can be a challenge, particularly in the current Google Analytics layout. Here’s a quick guide.
Entrances, bounces and bounce rate
‘Entrances’ is the number of visits to the page that didn’t come from somewhere else on the site. If 100 people visit a page, and if 80 of them came from the home page and the other 20 came straight to the page from another site, then the page has 20 entrances.
‘Bounces’ is the number of entrances which, when they left the page, went straight to another site. In our previous example, if 10 out of the 20 entrances just clicked ‘back’ and went off somewhere else, the page has 10 bounces.
Note that any number of the other 80 visitors could also have clicked off to another site straight from our page – that doesn’t affect the number of bounces. They would be counted – along with our 10 bounces – as ‘exits’, which is an issue for another day.
The ‘bounce rate’ is simply the number of bounces divided by the number of entrances. So, in our example, the bounce rate would be
10 / 20 = 0.5
or, expressed as a percentage, 50%.
That’s pretty high! What that says to you is that, when people come straight to this page, half the time they just leave your site straight away. This is the only page of your site they see.
Which is fine if you’re isitchristmas.com – but for most of us, this would be a worry.
Confusion in Google Analytics
So far so good – the numbers of entrances and bounces combine to give us a percentage, which is the bounce rate. But in Google Analytics, there are more figures than that, and they can muddy the waters a bit.
Figure 1 – bounces shown as percentage
It makes sense to see the bounce rate as a percentage ...
... but a percentage figure for bounces can be confusing.
For example, you can see in figure 1 that the figure for ‘bounces’ is given as a number and as a percentage. This is because Google Analytics has silently switched tack, and is now comparing the number of bounces on our page to the number of bounces on all the pages added together. This can be an interesting figure, but in the end it will never be as relevant as the bounce rate. In our example page, we have 10 bounces. Our home page, on the other hand, has 1000 bounces – way more than any other page. In fact it accounts for half the bounces recorded on the all the pages of the site put together! But that wouldn’t mean much if the home page was getting a million visits every day. That would give it a bounce rate of 0.001, or 0.1%.
My guess is that the reporting of bounces as a percentage of the site total is more of an afterthought by the Google Analytics team than a well thought-through attempt to give us a useful insight. But as long as you can avoid being sidelined by these less useful metrics, and keep your attention of the bounce rates themselves, you can pick out those underperforming pages and get them into shape.
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