Bounce rate is a metric that many marketers worry about—and with good reason. Bounce rates are often far too high, and a high bounce rate indicates your landing page experience is not meeting your visitor’s expectations. So what is a good bounce rate for a landing page? It’s not an easy question to answer. “Good” bounce rates differ by industry and channel, but almost every business has room to improve its bounce rates.
Currently, around 9 out of 10 users bounce, so aiming for a 0% bounce rate is unrealistic for any business. Bounce rates from 25% to 30% are usually as low as most websites can expect to see, and that’s after you’ve done conversion rate optimization.
Types of bounces
All bounces are single-page sessions on your site, but not all bounces should be considered equal. Several different actions can trigger a bounce: when a user returns to search results, closes their browser, enters a new URL in the address bar, follows an outbound link, or becomes inactive in their session. Even if someone reads a whole page, finds what they want, and then leaves, that’s a bounce.
Leaving after finding the information you want is more common on blog or article content, meaning a higher bounce rate on those pages is often acceptable. However, landing pages need to convert users to take action, and a user who bounces is a lost conversion.
There are several levels of severity when it comes to bounces, and the easiest way to differentiate them is to compare visitors’ engagement time and on-site behavior.
Hard bounces
Hard bounces come from visitors who have no interest in your page. They land and then leave almost immediately, sometimes before a page even loads fully. These can be mistake clicks, but they can also be users who bounce in frustration if your page speed is less than desirable. If you have a high number of hard bounces, you should assess both page speed and the relevance of your ads and keywords. You may find your landing page isn’t matching customer intent and is bringing in the wrong audience.
Medium bounces
A medium bounce comes from a visitor who stays on the page for a few seconds. They show more engagement than a hard bounce; they may scroll the page or click an on-page element. Medium bounces aren’t unqualified. They are users who are not finding what they want or what they see isn’t convincing them to convert.
Soft bounces
A soft bounce is a user who stays a decent length of time on your landing page. They may read and engage with your content but ultimately not convert. Why? Perhaps they’re not ready to commit or want to compare offers. These users are close to converting, so marketers find soft bounces the easiest user groups to retarget.
Landing page bounce rates by industry
Bounce rates differ by industry and channel because users’ intentions on e-commerce sites are different from those on a news article. A B2B website visitor is more difficult to convert than a user looking at low-cost groceries or essentials. Similarweb found that grocery stores have one of the lowest average bounce rates across industries, at 40.94%, while information-based sites like Wikipedia see the highest averages at around 61.55%.
Average bounce rates per industry
When you look at performance by marketing channel, you get an even better idea of how your campaigns stack up. The further along customers are in the marketing funnel, the more likely you are to see higher conversion—and lower bounces. Traffic from display ads or social media sees the highest bounce rates. The average bounce rate for email is 33.7%, and referral channels are 40.61%. Paid search has an average bounce rate of 33.95% and is one of the channels that can most benefit from landing page optimization.
Why you shouldn’t accept average bounce rates
Conversion rates can’t improve if bounce rates don’t decrease. Lower bounce rates are possible with optimization. Conversion rate optimization tactics aim to enhance user experience issues like page speed, improve the relevance of your ad messaging, and remove customer pain points or roadblocks that stop users from converting. If you benchmark your current bounce rate before optimizing, you can track how each optimization helps decrease your bounces and increase conversions.
How to lower your bounce rates
There will always be some visitors who bounce, but that doesn’t mean marketers should settle for average bounce rates. You can lower your bounce rate significantly by addressing each of the issues that cause soft, medium, and hard bounces.
Soft bounces are very close to being conversions—if you implement optimization on your landing page. A few tweaks in your messaging or user experience may be all you need to convince some of those soft bounces to convert on the spot. You can make your advertising budgets more efficient if you optimize your landing pages before spending more on retargeting and prioritize conversion rate optimization in order to improve ROAS and get these users across the line.
Personalization and 1:1 message matching appeal to medium bouncers who are interested in your service or product but don’t feel it quite fits their requirements. In many cases, your business could meet their needs, but you’re showing these users a generic landing page and not the information that’s most relevant to them. Using customized post-click landing pages for each of your main target personas goes a long way toward improving conversion rates.
Page speed optimization can improve page load time and reduce visitors who bounce purely from frustration. Combine that with improvements to your keyword targeting and audience relevance to decrease the number of hard bounces you get from unqualified traffic.
Create fully optimized landing pages
See lower bounce rates with fully optimized landing pages
With fully optimized landing pages, bounce rates are destined to be lower. Instapage is here to help. We offer three different plans to help take the stress out of building, optimizing, and converting—helping you to create better landing pages and see better results. Schedule an Instapage demo here.
