The bounce rate of your website is the percentage of people who click away from your website after a single engagement hit, with that hit usually being of the entrance page. It can be a very important metric in determining the viability of your ad campaigns as well as the success rates of your purpose-built landing pages. Properly managing your bounce rate can increase your advertising ROI as well as your total conversion rate, lowering your cost per unit of sales and increasing your ability to expand revenues across the board.
A high bounce rate usually indicates that your landing page is not relevant to your site visitors. This could be because of a misplaced advertisement or a less than precise keyword campaign.
Some of the factors that can affect the bounce rate of your website include: page views, page events, e-commerce items, social hits, e-commerce transactions and user-defined hits. You must be aware of all factors when it comes to measuring bounce rates between different types of events. For the most part, an acceptable bounce rate is between 35 and 45% for most websites and up to 80% for landing pages although e-commerce sites should be lower within the mid 20% range.
Pay special attention to items that may affect your bounce rate such as click fraud and bot clicks which artificially increase your bounce rate. Software and Apps such as Google Analytics will not be able to catch all of these, but you will certainly be able to filter clicks and follow trends if you pay attention to your analytics.
A lower bounce rate is always a good thing. In order to lower your bounce rate, you can increase the precision of your keyword campaign, run multivariate advertisements in order to see which ones bring in relevant customers and streamline your landing pages in order to create more interaction with the customer on click through.
Consistent messaging between ads and the page they link to is also key so as the customer is presented with a page that they would expect to see in clicking on your advertisement and not a general product category page which has little to no relevant link to the ad.
