Ask The Reader: What Is Your Bounce Rate?

Daniel

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Yesterday we had a guest post talking about the importance of having a low bounce rate. In the past I had also written about this topic, with the posts What Is Bounce Rate? and What Is High, Normal And Low Bounce Rates?.

Apart from talking about the definition and explaining how one can lower his bounce rate, though, I figured it would be interesting to actually compare your own bounce rate to that of other bloggers, so that you can analyze their sites and understand what you/them might be doing right and wrong.

That is the purpose of this post. I invite you all to write a comment below sharing your own bounce rate. Feel free to explain why it’s high/low, and what strategies you used to lower it in the past.

Depending on the amount/type of answers I might compile the best ones into a post, with practical tips for those who want to lower their own bounce rates.

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31 Responses to “Ask The Reader: What Is Your Bounce Rate?”

  • Carrie

    My bounce rate is around 50%. I try to keep it low by posting regularly with fresh new content. I also try to post at a consistent time so that my readers, many of who check my blog at the same time each day, will always see a new article.

  • matt mernagh

    hovers around 70%. been making strides to lower it further by increasing font size, adding more internal links, however most people are coming from search and find what they need right away.

  • Mcrapu

    Mine is at 64.98%. I have never paid any attention to the bounce rate before.

  • jorge jacobo

    I am wondering if by having your own website as a home page would show since I use different browsers at times. Only one of them signed in for google not to track.
    I am thinking my bounce rate would increase because I open my site and then leave,like right away, I don’t know, but one of these days I’ll work on checking and improving if necesary.

    So far shows 79 %.

  • Wendy Campbell

    Around 60% – this is down by about 20% after I reduced the number of posts per page from 5 to 3, and then eventually to two. The lowest bounce rate coming from search engines and the highest from StumbleUpon. Though I also have a lot of regular readers who don’t need to stay on the site beyond the daily post as they’ve already read the previous day’s material.

    Ultimately, I think it depends on the type of site you have and the content you are providing – some are more time consuming than others.

  • Daniel

    My Bounce rate is all over the place.

    It goes from the around 60% up to the high 80’s.

    Oddly enough, when my traffic increased quite a lot, my bounce rate was also quite high due to a high percentage of visitors just reading one article post then leaving.

  • ES

    The bounce rate in my technical site is 86% for the last month. Thats maybe because people come from google search looking for a specific topic and go back after they get their info.

    The musical site linked here has a bounce rate of 70% . I think its because of the design and also the popular posts. All the Top 10 Song posts (which are popular) link back to their respective song reviews and users can listen to the songs only when they click on the links and go there.

  • Steve George

    My bounce rate is 0.72% while averaging 240 unique visitors a day and 4.47 pages per visit.

  • Luci

    Since the relaunch of the new website, our highest was 59.12%. Then it went from 50.02% in March to 2.81% in April and has been consistently having BR below 6% since then… Can I know what could be the reasons?

  • padin

    75% for my personal blog..

    Readers might visit my blog to read single post,
    or latest post and move on..

  • Matt Grabusky

    My site’s bounce rate is 61%. I don’t do anything currently to try to lower it, but the more I read this blog, the more I think I should start.

  • prasad

    my bounce rate is nearly 80.if you have posts with images users tend to stay on posts some time looking at them.i think using images on your blog and large font size you can lower your bounce rate.

  • Ken

    I have a 56% (55.99) bounce rate. I think that’s high. I’m a new blogger and coming to these kinds of sites to find out how to make my conversion and stuff better.

    While my bounce is 56%, my conversion sucks-on all kinds of stuff. From the free eBook to affiliate banners to adsense links. I have no freakin’ idea. Maybe it’s just the wrong niche.

  • Tork @ Reviewd

    My Bounce rate currently sits at 47%. This is because my site dervies around users heading elsewhere when they first arrive.

    Review’d is my website. It is a free link directory. When you enter the homepage and you are a user that wishes to add your own site, you have to click “Submit” or the “Submit a Site” button. This is why my bounce rate is so low.

    For other websites, I recommend having a featured post widget on your homepage that directs to other pages. This will greatly influence the bounce rate.

  • Gillian

    One whole month after creating my blog (!), my bounce rate is 57.94%. I think that’s pretty OK for such a new creation although I’m doing what I can (including following your blog’s suggestions!) to increase visitors and decrease bounce rate.

  • Tom Ewer

    My blog has a lifetime bounce rate of 1.95%. This month so far, the bounce rate is 0.80%.

    Having said that, my traffic numbers are very low (about 35 uniques per day), which probably has a positive effect on my bounce rate.

  • Joao Crawford

    Wow. Mine is 76% last month. I gues that´s because most of my sites are made for adsense and they are very ugly. Will my rankings be affected soon??

  • Brian

    My bounce rate is 49.24%, split as follows:

    Direct: 27.91%
    Referral: 68.49%
    Organic: 18.75%

    I have a fairly popular but not directly related site linking to me that really boosts the overall bounce rate — but I’m mostly interested in keeping my organic bounce rate low, and for the time being it’s crazy low.

    However, my site is a store and not a blog, though I do have a blog on the site as well. I imagine regular blog readers bounce a lot since they read the most recent post and then are done for the day.

  • Grant Hughes

    My travel destination blog that is 4 years old has a bounce rate of less than 1%. The average user clicks through to 12 pages and stays on site a minimum of 5 minutes. In contrast my recipe blog which is the same age has a bounce rate of 80%.

    The travel site is geared towards a specific destination so people searching find it and hang around to learn more…the recipes site people come looking for a specific recipe and leave almost immediately.

  • Steve

    I think there’s a couple of factors that would determine your bounce rate.

    One is probably your site design. If people are turned off by your design, I would assume they would leave immediately.

    And 2, I believe is the keyword that brought the visitor to your site. If the content on your page isn’t what the visitor expected to find, then they would probably leave immediately.

    My bounce rate ranges from 30% to 80%, depending on the site.

  • Atish

    70%

  • suraj

    My bounce rate is 80% i tried lot of methods like related post widget or more but not able o decrease it…

  • Lionel Bachmann @ Model Trains

    60%

    The majority of our searches come from people searching for specific products or model numbers. I believe most would be price comparison shoppers, so we try to give them reasons to buy from us by using USPs.

  • Dhen Thomas

    My bounce rate is very high (89%).
    I think it is caused by:
    1. My blog is new
    2. Less content
    3. Google dance

  • George

    We run more than 10 websites, mostly using WordPress. To me, if the trend is for both more visitors and more average time onsite – the heck with bounce rate!

    In addition, if the differences between the visitor count from an external, and internal counters should not be as large as it is on our sites, if both are precise (ours can differ by more than a factor of 10). Those facts more than hint to me, at least, how counting clicks and assigning bounce rates can be.

    Longer lengths of time on a site and the trends in any one click-counting method seem to be more consistent measures of what’s actually happening.

    I did some editorial pieces on MeasurementMedia.com about site analytics and the errors I, and others, believe exist.

  • Jamie Northrup

    Most my websites are around 50-55%, but my personal brand website is about 80%, I believe like Jeremy that StumbleUpon is what brings it up.

    I haven’t really taken any steps to reduce them yet, but have recently taken an interest in it, so will probably be making some changes in the near future.

  • Findlifevalue

    74.02% in 2009-Aug and 70.23% in 2011-Aug for findlifevalue.blogspot.com

    I added more internal related link at each articles to improve it about 3~4%.

  • Lyndsy Simon

    80.68% for ShootersJournal.net

    This is because of the way we rank – we target specific keywords like “Remington 870 review”. People find us in Google and get exactly what they’re looking for, so while they “bounce”, they tend to stay a while and read.

    On the other hand, category pages tend to do well in terms of bounce rate – our handgun reviews page has a 25-30% bounce rate.

    So – I don’t think “lower is better” is necessarily true for bounce rate. It really depends on the visitors’ discovery method and what you’re trying to accomplish with that page.

  • Jeremy Myers

    81%

    Very high. I have never been below 75%.

    Though one time I inadvertently added two Google Analytics tracking codes, and dropped my bounce rate down to about 5%….

    I think my bounce rate is high due in part to submitting my posts to StumbleUpon. These visitors have nearly a 100% bounce rate.

  • Emily Suess

    Mine is anywhere from 55-60%, and I don’t actively do anything to influence those stats at this time. Because my site is a blog, where by nature people come for the latest content, read, and leave, I feel these numbers are pretty good.

    That said, if others out there with similar content are reporting much better numbers, I might be tempted to change my tune! 🙂

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