Definition
1.) In web analytics, the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing a single page.
2.) In email marketing, the percentage of emails in a campaign that are undeliverable.
Information
In web analytics, bounce rate is a popular metric used to describe the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of a particular web page. A high bounce rate may indicate a page that is viewed as unhelpful / unappealing. Or it may indicate a relevance problem between the page and it’s traffic sources. In other words, the page might be okay for some people, but it’s not reaching those people. This can be due to ranking (sometimes accidentally) for overly broad search term in organic search listings, using the wrong words or match types in PPC, or creating banners that are ambiguous or misleading, among other things.
However, bounce rate does not tell the whole story and must be used in conjunction with other metrics and knowledge of the content and visitors. News and reference pages can have high bounce rates even with good content, if people arrived at a page with one very specific task. Ideally, bounce rates will be lower for the home page and other navigation pages.
see also: Digital Marketing Tools
Articles
Reduce Your Bounce Rate In One Second
DailyBlogTips (April 26, 2011)
The Only Resource You’ll Ever Need To Read On Lowering Your Bounce Rates
CodyMyOwnRoad (September 22, 2010)
Reduce Bounce Rates: Fight for the Second Click
UseIt.com (June 30, 2008)
Standard Metrics Revisited: Bounce Rate
Occam’s Razor (August 6, 2007)
Related Terms
view all terms in the Web Analytics glossary or all terms in the Digital Marketing glossary
Sites
MailChimp: Email Marketing Benchmarks by Industry (including bounce rate)
