Bounce Rate Google Analytics: Basics You Need to Know About
If you want to increase your web page conversions, you must know how to interpret Bounce Rate Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool that you can use to understand your visitor journey. Based on that analysis, you can follow some proven strategies to improve your user's overall web experience.
So in this article, we shall all the relative information you need to understand if you want to know about Bounce Rate Google Analytics.
Guide to Bounce Rate in Google Analysis
Google support says that a bounce is defined as a single page session for a particular site if you google Bounce Rate definition. It is calculated as a session that triggers a single request to the server (Analytics). Think it like this way – when a user opens a web page on your site and leave without initiating any other requests to the server within that single session.
In easy words, a bounce rate is defined as the percentage of all those visitors that take no action or actions after they land on a particular web page. Those actions could be navigating to another web page, using a search box to look out for some relative information, or posting a comment.
Since there will be no subsequent action after the first hit on a website, the session duration will be considered as 0 seconds as per analytics.
Bounce rate is a great metric to measure and understand user engagement if you know how to use it properly. So, without further ado, let's look at how using google analytics bounce rate can be analyzed.
Note: There could be some cases in which the bounce rate will be lowered, but those web pages might not be converting well, so one must stay vigilant while analyzing the bounce rate.
How to calculate the bounce rate for a website and its pages?
The bounce rate can be calculated by using the below formula.
- Bounce Rate = Single Page Sessions / Total Sessions on the Site * 100.
For instance, if 100 visitors land on your site (total sessions) and five among them leave without initiating another request (single page session), your site's bounce rate will be 5%.
Similarly, page bounce rate can be calculated by using the below formula
- Page Bounce Rate = Single page session on the page / Total Sessions starting from the page * 100
For instance, in the above example, if 50 visitors land on your homepage and among them, two users leave without initiating another request, the bounce rate of your homepage will be 4% (as per the above-mentioned formula).
Using Google Bounce Rate Analytics Tool
Each page on a website should have a Google Analytics tracking ID within the code. This code triggers a session every time a visitor visits a particular website. And if a user exits a site without taking another action, the session will expire, and that specific visit will be categorized as a bounce. But if a user performs some action such that it triggers an event, that code fires and tells Google Analytics that it is not a bounce.
However, it is not always the case, as sometimes the data gets skewed for many different reasons. For example, Ad Blockers usually prevent the operation of tracking codes. In this way, you will not get to see such users within your analytics. Due to slow loading web pages, impatient users might leave or bounce before the tracking code activates and loads, and then session timeouts issues and other improper tracking setups can affect the data.
In the Reports section of Google Analytics, you can check out the bounce rate metric under the behavior tab. There is a data table within Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion Tabs. Under site content, you can see data for bounce rate in the Behavior tab if you click "All Pages." Also, there is an option of checking bounce rates for a particular web page within Google Analytics Tool. Using different filtering advanced features such as inclusions, exclusion, metrics, and dimensions, you can refine your web page results.
You can also exclude those pages from the reports you think the bounce rates will be higher. For instance, if you are running an e-commerce website and want to know how your site pages perform other than your blog pages, you can exclude your blog pages from your report and analyze the traffic for the rest of your website pages.
Bounce Rate Vs. Exit Rate
These terms, Bounce rate, exit rate, and Dwell time, are three different metrics, but they are being used interchangeably, so let's get to know each of these terms.
Exit Rate:
Imagine if a user lands onto your e-commerce website's homepage, navigate through a category, and ends on a product page. If the user leaves your e-commerce website from the product page, an exit will be attributed to your product page and affect its exit rate. So it shows the percentage of all those sessions that end on a particular page. Technically you can consider every bounce as an exit but not every exit as a bounce.
Importance of tracking Google Analytics Bounce Rate
Tracking bounces will help you understand how the users are interacting with the individual pages on your website. Using these stats will allow you to make better decisions regarding marketing and site optimization.
Suppose a visitor is being directed to the landing page and not progressing to the rest of the web pages. In that case, you should consider optimizing your website for a better user experience.
Good bounce rate Google Analytics
There is no such thing as a good bounce rate as it depends on the customer journey. Bounce rate differs among landing pages and the associated traffic sources.
Are higher bounce rates a bad indication?
It depends and varies on the type of website. For example, if you have an e-commerce website and a user leaves after being direct to your homepage without looking at your product's page, you will not get a sale out of it. You would want that user to access all of your products pages and then eventually the shopping cart to check out page. If that is not happening on such a website of yours, you should investigate and design a user-friendly website.
But If your website has a single page (landing page) in which a single-page session is expected, you can avoid getting tensed by looking at a higher bounce rate.
How to reduce a bounce rate?
You have to examine a bounce rate from various perspectives. For instance, the Audience Overview report, Channel Report, All traffic, and All pages report. You will have to identify the core reason for having a higher bounce rate. If there is a problem with few pages, you would want to review the content. You might want to see if the tracking codes are being implemented correctly.
Software for UX/UI design
The best approach to tackle bounces is to design a user-friendly website from the very beginning. The first step of creating a website is to build a prototype that can mimic the original website after development.
There are many tools available to design a prototype, but the user-friendly and features loaded tool is Wondershare Mockitt.
Wondershare Mockitt
Mockitt is an online prototyping tool that you can use to create a website prototype for any website. Once you complete the prototype, you can share them with your stakeholders for review and approval.
- Mockitt is a user-friendly tool and has a clean and uncluttered interface.
- By just using the drag and drop feature, you can use Mockitt to create stunning prototypes.
- It has a vast library of Widgets and icons that you can place anywhere on your working screen.
- Mockitt has an advanced color palette that you can use or can also create your customized palette.
- Mockitt allows you to create internal links within your web pages – making your design interactive and appealing.
- It provides a collaborative work environment in which you can work with your team.
