What is Considered a Good Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is one of those metrics that SEOs, content marketers, and even UI/UX experts generally pay attention to. It can share insights into how engaging your website and its contents are to visitors.

What is Bounce Rate?

Before we dive further and into the more technical details, it is a good idea to first clarify what we mean by bounce rate. This is important because there seems to be a lot of confusion regarding this term and what it means.

Some people use the terms bounce rate and exit rate interchangeably. But these two terms are different and represent different things.

According to Google, bounce rate is the percentage of single pageview visits to a website. A more accurate definition is that the bounce rate is the percentage of single-engagement sessions.

In other words, bounce rate is calculated when a visitor visits a single page on your website and leaves that page without doing anything on it.

For example, someone visits a web page, does not click on any button or page, or fill out a form, and just quits that page without taking any action.

Generally, you want the bounce rate to be as low as possible. This means that a higher percentage of website visitors are taking actions and visiting other pages on your site before they quit the page they initially landed on.

What is a Good Bounce Rate?

Now that we understand what a bounce rate is, it is time for the trickier part: to answer what a good bounce rate is.

The reason it is tricky is because there are numerous variables involved in the equation.

For instance, some industries just have a high bounce rate, while other industries may have a lower bounce rate. Moreover, some websites have a higher percentage of one-off landing pages. Such websites will likely have a higher bounce rate. Bounce rate also varies among different traffic sources and devices. Depending on how you mostly get traffic and which devices your visitors usually use, you may also experience high or low bounce rates.

As you can see, there is a bunch of factors involved, which makes it difficult to share one number as an “ideal” bounce rate.

Bounce rates usually range from 30 percent to 70 percent. Generally, however, a bounce rate of 40 to 50 percent is considered good for most websites in most industries.

Bounce Rate by Industries

As we mentioned earlier, different industries have different bounce rates. So, it is a good idea to take a look at different industries and see what the average bounce rate in those industries is.

If you work in one of those industries, the following data should give you a benchmark — a reference point — to see how well you are doing against the industry average.

Contentsquare recently released its annual digital experience benchmark report. This report contains a lot of data: more than 20 billion user sessions in 25 different countries and 11 industries.

According to this report, B2B has the highest average bounce rate at 75 percent. Moreover, the energy industry had the lowest bounce rate at just 38 percent.

Here is the bounce rate for each of the 11 industries:

The overall bounce rate across the 11 industries was 47 percent.

So, even if you don’t belong to any of the above-mentioned industries, you should aim for a bounce rate that is less than 47 percent.

According to another study, this time by RocketFuel, the average bounce rate for their sample set was 49 percent.

Conclusion

Bounce rate is a good metric to learn more about your website’s quality of content, design, user-friendliness, and overall level of engagement. However, there is no ideal bounce rate number to aim for.

A bounce rate of less than 45 percent will generally be considered good — unless you are in an industry that has a significantly lower average bounce rate.

On the other hand, a bounce rate of 60 will also be considered good if you are in the B2B industry, because the average bounce rate in B2B can go up to 75 percent.

To improve your bounce rate, improve the quality of your website content, web design, and make it easy for visitors to navigate to other pages on your site.