Google Analytics Bounce Rate

[rvolk75]

Hey gang,

I've been analyzing the numbers from GA and I was somewhat curious about the Bounce Rate. I'm currently at 25%. Is this number too low, too high or average?

I know it would be nice to be at 0%, but that will never happen. What would you consider a "good" bounce rate? What's the benchmark?

Thanks in advance.

[docmuller]

Thats strange, I just logged in to post this very same question, and you were the newest post. I have seen my bounce rate go from 25% up to 40% over the last 6 months, so what is an acceptable level

[rvolk75]

That's too funny. Beat ya!

I went live with a REW site about 3 months ago, so I don't have years of data to analyze, but it's been pretty consistent at 25% the whole time.

[Madtown RM]

I'm not officially live yet so I don't know if that affects my bounce rate or not but I'm currently at 42% and have been for several weeks. Not to hijack the thread, but it may have something to do with all the unexplained bad links I have right now. I just posted this to see if I can get to the bottom of it.

[docmuller]

If your not live the only people on your site are the developers and you, so your bounce rate doesn't matter yet

[Discover Davis Homes]

I think we should think of bounce rate more just as a measure of how well our site is doing with our users rather than something that affects ranking. Our real estate sites especially ones with built-in IDX have an advantage over a lot of other industries in that the listings provide a hook to keep people interested in our sites. Mine has ranged from somewhere in the 20's to as high as 50%. Right now it has been sitting in the mid 30%. I am happy with the current numbers - I expect as traffic increases that the bounce rate will go up - I've decided I'm not going to worry about it.

[rvolk75]

I think the bounce rate directly translates into visitor's first impression. If they don't like what they see, they leave.

In my case, 25 out of 100 people decided to go somewhere else for information. The question is, why?

[SCP]

@rvolk75 - You are exactly right. When your bounce rate starts to increase for pages, its time to start looking at that page's content and the keywords users are landing on that page with.

[Discover Davis Homes]

Russell - I think that 25 out of 100 is really pretty good - when you look at analytics I am sure there are people who hit your site that were not intending to look at real estate at all. They are the most likely candidates who bounce. We want our sites to be found for real estate related terms, obviously, but the search engines also string words together from our sites in odd ways.

[jamesww]

Ok so I have had conversations with many people on this subject and this is what I have been told. Most peoples real estate sites run around 30-35% bounce rates. And most blog sites range between 50-60%. The numbers for blogs come from some of the more popular blogger forums.

In most cases bouce rates have more to do with how long it takes for your site to load than it has to do with whether people like your layout. If your site takes more than 8 seconds to load then you will have a high bounce rate.