What Does Bounce Rate Mean For My UX? (in 2024)

Analytics are the breadcrumbs of clues left behind by your users.

They highlight user behaviour; how they found your site/app, how they reacted and what they did next.

These details can be invaluable for understanding how you can optimise your engagement and conversion metrics.

But there’s one metric that stands out as a huge red flag for any user experience or marketing team, bounce rate.

So, what does bounce rate mean for my UX? Generally, if your bounce rate is higher, it means that your UX is lacking as users are only reaching one page before tuning out. However, if your bounce rate is lower, it generally means that your UX is good because more pages are being visited by users, which will ultimately lead to more conversions.

From that perspective, it makes sense to be worried about your bounce rate. After all, more people leaving your site after one page surely means users don’t like your experience, right?

Keep reading to find out more about bounce rates, how they affect your UX, and why they aren’t always the warning sign you think they are.

What is ‘Bounce Rate‘?

Put simply, bounce rate is a common web analytics metric designed to measure the percentage of users that visit just one page on your site before leaving.

Google’s definition of a bounce rate goes further, indicating that the bounce rate also requires the single page visited to have not triggered any events or conversions that are recorded by analytics.

This means that no forms are being completed under conversions and no links are clicked on to continue their journey in your funnel.

In short: it’s literally a session that the customer arrives, has a brief scroll (if that), and leaves.

The higher the bounce rate, the greater proportion of your visitors are only reaching one page before tuning out, and as a result, the worse it looks on your website.

If the bounce rate is lower, this is usually for the better because it means that more pages will be visited.

This in turn, increases the likelihood of conversions, but not always (we’ll come onto that later).

Bad UX can have users heading towards the exit fast

What does ‘Bounce Rate‘ mean for UX?

Interestingly, bounce rate can be one of the most telling signs of bad UX in many cases we’ve experienced.

Here are some of the main reasons why you may have a high bounce rate:

Content is uninteresting or long
Untrustworthy/unappealing site design or indicators (e.g. http)
Call to action (CTA) is missing or broken
Slow loading
Bad content structure: E.g. lack of line breaks, confusing layout
Not mobile friendly
Accidental clicks in search/social

Naturally, you will want a lower bounce rate because it indicates that more of your content is reached and that your visitors are invested beyond the page they landed on.

However, there is more to it than that. In some cases, having a high bounce rate should be expected. According to SemRush, the average bounce rate for most websites is somewhere between 26% and 70% and is not considered bad.

Let’s take a look at blog pages as an example:

Bounce Rate on Blogs

Blogs are often found through organic traffic searching for a specific keyword or query.

Think about how many times you may have been interested in a topic enough to search for the answer.

After you get that answer, the itch is scratched and you don’t always want to dig through the site any further. This in turn leads to a higher bounce rate on things like blogs where the answer is the customer’s desired outcome, not conversion or engagement.

Blogs typically have bounce rates of 65%+, making them particularly high compared to the average of 26% and 70% mentioned earlier.

There is of course room to reduce this by having call-to-actions on pages or ‘similar posts’, depending on whether it is relevant, but it’s an expectation that bounce may be higher than in some industries.

Instead, what might be more valuable metrics are time-on-page, interactions with media like videos and returning visits that can validate your content’s value to the reader and make them stand out as a prospect.

Is Bounce Rate Important?

It can be, but definitely depends on the context. Bounce rate is important because it is a good way to measure user engagement. However, as mentioned in the blog post example, its usefulness does vary depending on what you want your page to do and supporting metrics.

Where bounce rates can be particularly important is for product pages and homepages where engagement and link clicks are expected. If users aren’t coming in and exploring the site or converting by triggering an event (that would prevent it being a bounce), then this is a sign of an underlying problem.

The Culprits For High Bounce Rates

Broken Links

Low Quality / Hard To Read Content

Difficulty Navigating

Accidental Clicks/Bots

Improving Insights From Bounce Rate: Google Analytics to Pair With

Bounce rate alone may not tell you the whole story and can’t always be diagnosed by looking at that statistic in isolation.

Looking at bounce rate alongside other metrics/data can show a more complete picture of your users experience and deliver actionable insights:

Landing Page:

As we mentioned, not all pages are built equally in what they mean for your bounce rate.

By looking through your landing page metrics and insights alongside bounce rate, you can determine which pages require optimisation or redesign if you are receiving higher than normal bounce rates.

This can help you target where you may need to set up screen recordings and focus your attention.

Session Duration:

Bounced sessions with short durations typically tell you that something has gone wrong fast. Here are some things to look out for:

The page design hasn’t given your user trust
Buttons might not have been working
Content might have not been what they were after or too cumbersome
The user may have miss clicked

Longer sessions usually have more positive connotations. It could mean that the user was consumed by the content and needs time to consider the offer. (Top tip – this is a prime time for retargeting ads.)

On the flip side, the page could have been left idle for a long time before clicking off. Session duration alongside the bounce rate can be a good indicator of immediate UX problems, especially when investigated further with screen recording.

Screen recordings:

Bounce rates can only tell you so much from a metrics standpoint. However, recordings can illustrate the point with exactly what the user saw and experienced.

Using GDPR compliant tools like Smart Look or HotJar, you can see exactly where users are trailing off.

Remember to ask yourself these questions:

Was there a certain bit of content that people didn’t like?
Did they see your call-to-action?
How did they react to your content?

This can help you discover if your longer session durations are delivering more value to the user because of a great user experience, e.g. scrolling through all the content on page.

Device:

Did you know that mobile bounce rates are 10% to 20% higher than on desktop?

You could have the perfect website for desktop sessions, but it may not be optimised to different screen sizes and devices. Alongside bounce rate, we recommend checking out the breakdown across desktop, mobile and tablets to indicate if your bounce rate is higher via one channel.

A lack of page responsiveness can result in pages loading jumbled, glacial loading speeds and difficulty navigating among other big UX red flags that can encourage bounces.

Behaviour Flow:

Behaviour flow in Google Analytics, is a great tool for visualising where people go from different pages, giving you a simple way of determining if your funnel is working as expected. If a page crucial to your conversion funnel has a high bounce rate, you will be able to see the drop off in comparison to stages before and after to see if there’s a distinct issue at that point in the process.

Whilst GA4 does not have a behaviour flow report, it does offer exploration templates to follow your user’s journey. You can use your funnel exploration report to track a predetermined path or your path exploration for free-form tracking.

Conversions:

Imagine you have a ‘request a demo’ form on a squeeze page you’ve built (a page designed to get details from a user). Let’s say your bounce rate is incredibly high, but when you compare them to your conversion goals, they don’t reflect the same picture that your bounces do. They are converting on the page but still being counted as bounces.

This could be because event tracking isn’t set up on these pages correctly to not count visits that only had one page load but had an embedded form completed. By ensuring event tracking is set up correctly, you can not only reduce your bounce rate on key pages, but also get a more accurate reading about whether your pages are converting before they leave the page.

Geography:

Location can make all the difference when it comes to gathering insight from your bounce rates. Is there a large market for visitors abroad to access your products and services and they are unable to access your site due to the language barrier? If this is the case, you may need to enhance UX by offering on-page translations to better communicate your offer.

On top of this, there is also the issue of a website appearing from a search term but the products and services are not available in that country. In this case, more focus on location targeting is needed.

In Conclusion

Bounce rate is not amazingly useful on its own. You can’t tell if people are looking at the content, if conversions are happening and the overall bounce rate for your site as a whole is too broad for any use.

However, bounce rates are a great indicator of where UX problems can be and are a great starting point for further investigation when paired with other metrics. High bounce rates can be worrying on most pages depending on industry, services and content purpose, however, it’s not universal. Some pages like blog posts and squeeze pages can be justified in having higher bounces in order to serve their purpose for their audience.

Useful Resources on Bounce Rates

Content Square: Bounce rates by industry and device statistics

Semrush: Difference between bounce rates and exit rates

Neil Patel: Bounce rate demystified infographic

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