Any business will know that getting the customers in the store is part of an overall story, and you’ll now need to keep them interested and eventually, you hope they’ll make a purchase and then return!
The same logic applies to your website, especially if you are running an eCommerce store. But without physical people in front of you walking in and out of your store, how would you know that you’re not keeping a customer’s interest?
Bounce rate through Google Analytics can help with this. It will allow you to see the number of users who exit the page without doing anything else.
But how exactly do you calculate this? We’re going to show you with this complete guide. So, let’s find out how to calculate bounce rate!
What Exactly Is Bounce Rate?
Bouncing, which is sometimes referred to as a single page session, refers to when a user has visited a page on your website and does not trigger another request.
In other words, they do not click hyperlinks, they don’t access other pages on your website and do not click a CTA (call to action) and then simply leave.
For example, a user may have landed themselves on your website’s homepage. Maybe scrolled down the page, did not interact with anything and then “bounced”.
If you’re running an eCommerce store, knowing the figures of how many people are doing this can be indicative of a poorly operational page, a poor product, a wildly overpriced product or something else that could be putting the user off.
The specific bounce rate is the percentile figure of user sessions that end up in a bounce (sessions that start and finish on the same page with no interactions).
Every single bounce rate per page will affect your website’s overall bounce rate. Next, we’ll look at how you can calculate your bounce rate.
Calculating Bounce Rate
A website’s overall bounce rate is calculated through dividing the number of single page sessions by the total number of site sessions.
So, let’s show you an example.
Let’s say you have 100 users that access your website. 5 of these users leave without doing anything else (bounce/single page session). This means that the number is 5/100 which equates to a 5% bounce rate.
Here is the equation:
Website bounce rate = single page sessions / total sessions
If you want to know how to calculate a page’s specific bounce rate, this equation is exactly the same but you calculate it using only the value of that page specifically.
Using your homepage as an example. If you had 50 people access your homepage and then 2 users left without doing anything else – this page’s bounce rate equates to 4%.
Viewing Your Bounce Rate
You can view your bounce rates using Google Analytics. The bounce rate appears in reports using a table for data.
If you look on the left hand side, you will notice a table icon on the behavior tab. Click this and then scroll down to site content and then all pages. The sixth column across has your bounce rate.
The large number at the top tells you your average and the rest are your bounce rate for specific pages on your website. The page specifically is listed on the first column.
You can get more specific information by utilizing the advanced search function within Google Analytics, which you can access from the top of the page.
Notable Information
Something that is often overlooked with this data is that you can exclude some figures from your reports, which is particularly useful when it comes to bounce rate.
For example, if you’re operating an eCommerce website, you may want to know your user traffic specifically for your store and you’re not interested in the number of users accessing your blog or the about us page.
To exclude this data, click the “include” button and change this to exclude and then type in your page that you want to exclude the data from. In our above example, this would be /blog/.
What Is Exit Rate?
Exit rate and bounce rate are two different types of data. Although they are similar, they can give us different indications of things with websites and web pages.
Bounce rate refers to when a user accesses a web page, then does not trigger an additional request and then leaves. However, exit rate is when a user does trigger an additional request but then leaves.
Exit rate data can show you what pages a user left which can be very useful for user behavior, but bounce rate might be slightly more indicative of the overall success of a page or your website.
Easiest way to remember the difference is, every bounce is an exit, but not all exits are bounces.
Does Tracking Bounce Rate Matter?
Bounce rates can be highly beneficial, so it is definitely worth tracking it, especially as a startup or new eCommerce business.
The indicative data that it can provide you can actually shape how you will optimize or market certain pages. You may even decide to switch things around.
Let’s say for example, you have put a lot of resources into one page and nobody is interacting with it, you may wish to redistribute them to a different page.
Similarly, if users are not interacting with a page which is critical to revenue, you may need to re-optimize it for users to be able to know exactly where they are going and why.
The Bottom Line
Bounce rates are easy to calculate and by using Google Analytics. They’re also pretty simple to see and understand.
Paying close attention to this rate can be important for your marketing strategy, so always bear this in mind!
Hi, my name is Justin Shaw, I started my career with a Masters in Computer Science but found writing to be my forte'.
I'm now the Principal Tech writer for GshiftLabs.com as well as a few other well known publications. I help make the complex world of Tech-Jargon easy to understand.
