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.
Why waste time on something that you are not good at? Outsourcing to many companies and executives definitely looks like a good idea. Outsourcing is a business practice where companies outsource/contract out selected or part of their business operations to other companies that specialise in those operations in order to lower cost and improve efficiency. Outsourcing can definitely help companies save time, money, space and also the need for training. Outsourcing as a business function was first formally introduced as a business strategy in 1989, this practice’s origins began in the aftermath of World War II. Today, countries such as India and China is the world’s leading outsourcing countries.
Many companies today are still utilising outsourcing for the above benefits. However like a coin, there’s always two sides to outsourcing, the good and the bad. On the bad side, outsourcing can bring about bad customer service and poor service or product quality. Many companies and executives today are finding that outsourcing does not really provide the cost and time savings they had hoped for. Many are finding that they are being burdened by the inflexibility of contracts as well as factors such as rising shipping and transportation costs. Most importantly, outsourcing ultimately hurts your economy back home where jobs back home are loss to foreign countries and this is a big and concerning issue in most countries today including back here in Australia.
This is why there’s been call and action by both people, governments as well as businesses to bring the jobs back home. Some have call this phenomenon as ‘backshoring’ and ‘reinsourcing’. To me, I think this is definitely a good idea as companies can provide better customer service, dedicated customer support and also better quality as well. And of course, we get to keep our jobs back home and ultimately, this benefits our economy!
