bounce rate, what % is acceptable

[pustema]

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What do you guys consider a good bounce rate? (apart from zero) my site has 30-40% seems pretty high to me.

[awgthomas]

I aim for a bounce rate no higher than 25% ...

(but dont get it on all of my sites)

[D-Mac]

It depends where the bouncing traffic comes from. Rather than looking at the percentage as a whole, it's better to look at it in terms of traffic source or keywords.

For example, on your big keywords you would hope for a very low bounce rate, but on some long tail keywords, that are only marginally relevant to your site, it would be fine to have a much higher bounce rate. What I am saying is don't let the 'noise' dilute your understanding of your important traffic.

[hpops]

It depends where the bouncing traffic comes from. Rather than looking at the percentage as a whole, it's better to look at it in terms of traffic source or keywords.

For example, on your big keywords you would hope for a very low bounce rate, but on some long tail keywords, that are only marginally relevant to your site, it would be fine to have a much higher bounce rate. What I am saying is don't let the 'noise' dilute your understanding of your important traffic.

Great advice - although Bounce Rate is a useful stat its only really relevant on a granular level. If all your bounce comes from one channel - there's something wrong with the channel - if from one keyword, maybe your ranked inappropriately or bidding incorrectly - find your key targets and check your bounce from these - in those circumstances the lower the better but 25% wouldn't be a disaster.
Its a stat that when viewed in isolation can become a tail chasing exercise.

[pustema]

Thanks David,
will look into it, also I checked your site, maybe I will use your services in the future.

[jezaff]

How long is a piece of string? As above, traffic source is critical. I work for a big name branded site for the 'day job' and it can vary massively.

Obviously we get <5% or so for people searching for our brand, but other terms can vary massively. Other terms will be >90% as the site has nothing to do with them yet a high PR site tends to rank for all kinds of things we don't intend!

On my personal community site I get very low bounce for "term + forum" as people are clearly searching for a forum, and they find it!

And finally, for an affiliate site, a bounce of 100% is arguably ideal! Your goal is to get people from your site to another site, if you can do this in one step then congratulations. The longer your funnel to conversion the more chance of drop out.

Ultimately your site's goal should be to funnel visitors to affiliate site, but if you can get a landing page that ranks for "buy televisions" then you just want these people to go straight off to the telly shop asap! I met the CEO of a big name international shopping aggregator a while back and he unashamedly tried to get people on and off the site in one step!

I have made one or two afternoon based adsense traps in the past (I aim to get the site up + content in just one afternoon), the ones that work best tend to get about 10 visitors a day but 50% of them bounce straight off via an adsense click netting me a couple of quid. Get a hundred such sites up and ... !

Good luck

[pustema]

Thanks Jezaff,
in your opinion is it better to have a site that gets the surfer to click straight through to the merchant or try and pre-sell first, I mean grab the cookie and hope for the best or try and build up a name for (possible) return visitors, this has been my question for a while, one of my competitors sends them straight off, no messing with quality content he gets the cookie no matter where they click so his bounce rate must be very high.