What is the bounce rate?

In online marketing, the bounce rate describes the percentage of visitors to a website or subpage who leave this page without visiting any other pages.

The terms bounce rate and exit rate are often used interchangeably, although they are actually two different parameters, as the exit rate looks at an entire session and therefore shows how often this was the last page of a visit. The bounce rate can be used to measure the success of a website or its subpage, a campaign with display or text ads or a mailing.

Factors that influence the bounce rate include technical factors, the traffic source or the structure of a website, whereby a high bounce rate can be caused, for example, by incorrect integration of tracking codes or poor content as well as a non-optimal UX / UI design. The effectiveness of advertising campaigns in social media and search engine advertising can therefore be influenced by the bounce rate. A high bounce rate could indicate that the landing page is not relevant or convincing enough, which requires a revision of the advertising content and the page itself.

Another term that is often used in connection with the bounce rate is the so-called return to SERP rate. This indicates the number of visitors in relation to page visits who return to the search results after visiting the page. Search engines such as Google take user interaction signals such as the exit rate into account in order to evaluate the relevance and quality of a website. A high exit rate could therefore lead to a website being ranked lower in the search results. The bounce rate therefore also plays an important role in search engine optimization.