What Is The Average Bounce Rate?

Many customers and people have asked me these questions before: “What is the average bounce rate of websites”? “Is my bounce rate good or bad”? In fact, I don’t really know what is the exact answer to the first question. First of all it really depends on what type of websites you have and the industry you are in. Also, where they are coming from and also what source or keywords they found you and enter your site. If it is brand keywords, then I would think most websites definitely have a bounce rate of less than 10%. If not, your brand is either a generic word, there are other companies with the same brand name or you have a serious problem with your brand. if it the source is broader or more generic, then a high bounce rate is definitely understandable. On average, I would think that a 30 to 40% bounce rate is acceptable across all sources.

Actually, what is exactly bounce rate? This is also one question that I have been asked many times before as well and I bet most people don’t exactly know what is bounce rate and how it is measured. Bounce rate as defined by Wikipedia is:

The percentage of visitors who enter the site and "bounce" (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.

A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.

 

where

• Rb = Bounce rate
• Tv = Total number of visitors viewing one page only
• Te = Total entries to page

A visitor may bounce by:

• Clicking on a link to a page on a different web site
• Closing an open window or tab
• Typing a new URL
• Clicking the "Back" button to leave the site
• Session timeout

A commonly used session timeout value is 30 minutes. In this case, if a visitor views a page, doesn't look at another page, and leaves his or her browser idle for longer than 30 minutes, they will register as a bounce. If the visitor continues to navigate after this delay, a new session will occur.
The bounce rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page. In contrast, the bounce rate for a web site is the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a web site per session divided by the total number of web site visits.

Now back to the question again. What is the average bounce rate? Most online sources I have read have reported an average bounce rate of around 40%. There’s quite a lot of articles on Google that will tell you what is the average bounce rate. Kissmetrics report an average bounce rate of 40.5% and they’ve got a cool infographics and pdf regarding this topic. Enjoy.