What is a Good Bounce Rate? (+ The #1 Reason Yours is Too High)

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The short (and frustrating) answer is: it depends.

But let’s dive into the long (and more helpful) answer!

The ideal bounce rate can vary significantly based on several key factors:

• Industry: Different sectors have different user behavior norms. For example, e-commerce sites typically aim for lower bounce rates than informational sites.
• Type of page and purpose of page: A product page should generally have a lower bounce rate than a blog post, as the former is designed to move users further down the sales funnel.
• Traffic source: Users coming from paid ads might have different expectations (and thus, different bounce rates) compared to those arriving from organic search.
• Target audience: Your audience's demographics and intent can greatly influence bounce rates. Tech-savvy Gen Z-ers, for instance, tend to navigate sites differently than older generations.

Though bounce rates vary based on these factors, we can still iron out some general benchmarks. While these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, they can provide a useful starting point for evaluating your site's performance. 

Some general benchmarks to consider when checking your bounce rates are:

• Homepage: 40-60%
• Landing page: 30-50%
• Blog post: 65-80%

Remember, these are just general guidelines. Your specific goals and circumstances should always be the primary consideration when evaluating your bounce rate.

If your bounce rate is too high, most likely one of two things is off:

• CTAs/next steps: If users aren't clear on what to do next or aren't compelled by your calls-to-action, they're more likely to leave without further engagement.
• Positioning and messaging: A mismatch between what users expect to find and what your page actually offers can lead to quick exits. This could be due to unclear value propositions, misleading ad copy, or content that doesn't meet user intent.

Understanding these common culprits is the first step toward improvement. Now, let's take a look at how you can fix your messaging and lower your bounce rates, ensuring that your website not only attracts visitors but keeps them engaged and moving through the buyer journey. 

1. Understand Your Target Audience

Improving your bounce rate starts with your audience. If you don’t understand your target buyer — their problems, their pain points, the way they speak about those problems and pain points — you’re going to struggle to craft messaging that resonates well enough to keep them from bouncing.

How can you zero in on those elements and dial in your messaging? Start with the jobs-to-be-done framework. This framework helps to understand precisely what your customer is trying to accomplish, which will better help you figure out how your brand can help (and how you can show that off to your buyer).

Next, you need to learn customer challenges by getting them right from the horse’s mouth. Listening to the customers and gathering insights from them. “But Mallory, I don’t have the resources to conduct user surveys right now,” you say? No problem: you already have the insights you need.

Or rather, your sales team does.

Listening to sales calls can provide invaluable information about customer questions and hesitations. Analyze customer questions and objections to identify common themes. This firsthand information can guide you in creating content that directly addresses these concerns, potentially reducing bounce rates — and helping your sales team convert more leads in the process.

Related Read: Planning a Website Update? Read This First! (+ 5 Expert Tips)

Remember, the goal is to create a website experience that resonates with your visitors from the moment they land on your page. By understanding their needs, concerns, and motivations, you can craft content that keeps them engaged and reduces the likelihood of them bouncing.

2. Craft Your Brand Positioning

Another key element in reducing bounce rates is vital (and accurate) brand positioning. Site visitors need to understand what you do, why they should care, and why they should listen to you. If those things aren’t present, they’re bouncing.

Start by addressing industry-wide struggles that your target audience faces. Your site's copy and offerings should make visitors think, “Wow, these guys get me.”

Once you’ve laid out the problems in a way that makes your audience feel seen, highlight your unique approach to solving these problems. What sets you apart from competitors? Why is your solution more effective? By clearly articulating your value proposition, you give visitors a compelling reason to stay on your site and learn more.

Still, there’s another challenge you need to overcome. Chances are, this isn’t the first time your target buyer has attempted to solve the problem they’ve come to your site looking to solve. If you want to earn their trust, you need to demonstrate why the things they’ve tried so far haven’t worked — and why you’re different. 

You don’t have to directly disparage your competitors, just show how your approach addresses gaps or inefficiencies in current offerings. 

Some things to avoid when positioning your brand:

• Don't focus too heavily on product features at the expense of benefits. Visitors care more about how you can solve their problems than about your product's technical specs.
• Don’t just mimic big brand strategies. If you're not the market leader, you can't market like one. Instead, leverage your unique strengths and position yourself as the best solution for your specific target audience.

These strategies will help you position yourself like a pro and engage site visitors.

3. Align Messaging with the Buyer Journey

Ultimately, we want more traffic not just for the warm fuzzy feeling of having lots of site visitors, but because we’re hoping to convert those visitors into leads and then buyers.

To accomplish that, we need to guide them along our buyer journey stages. The best way to achieve this is to tailor your messaging to the different stages of the journey, meeting cold, warm, and hot traffic where they are and speaking to their unique needs. 

Understanding the demand pyramid, a concept popularized by Chet Holmes, is crucial for aligning your messaging with the buyer journey. This concept suggests that only a tiny percentage of your market is actively looking to buy at any given time, while a more significant portion may be open to it, and the majority are not interested at the moment.

In other words, if you’re only creating messaging for hot traffic, you’re missing out on somewhere in the realm of 90% of your potential future buyers.

Instead, create content for different stages of buyer readiness. For those at the top of the pyramid (actively looking to buy), provide detailed product information and clear calls-to-action. 

For the larger middle section, focus on educational content that highlights the benefits of your solution. For the base of the pyramid, create awareness content that introduces your brand and the problems you solve.

Structure your website to guide visitors through this journey. Your homepage should cater to various stages of readiness, with clear pathways for visitors to find more detailed information as their interest grows. This strategic approach can significantly reduce bounce rates by providing relevant content for visitors at every stage of the buying process.

4. Optimize Your Content

Your messaging and site content are your main defense against the dreaded bounce. As a result, content optimization is another of the critical strategies you can use to keep visitors engaged and bounce rates low. 

Let’s take a look at some common ways to optimize site content for lower bounce rates:

1. Start by proactively addressing common objections. If potential customers often have concerns about price, implementation time, or compatibility, create content that directly addresses these issues.
2. Use clear, benefit-focused headlines that immediately communicate the value of your offering. 
3. Incorporate social proof and testimonials throughout your site to build trust and credibility. 
4. Stay attuned to market trends and challenges in your industry. Then, you can present your solution as a novel approach to these challenges, highlighting how it differs from conventional methods.

Remember, the goal is to create content that attracts visitors and keeps them engaged. Each piece of content should provide value and make them want to dig deeper into your website — and your sales funnel. 

Don’t be afraid to conduct some A/B testing with different messaging on key pages to see what resonates best with your audience, then optimize over time. 

5. Continuous Improvement

Last but not least, if you want to improve your bounce rates, you must be ready for continuous improvement. In other words, your website can’t be a “set it and forget it” type of asset if you want to keep those bounce rates low. 

Start by tracking key metrics. These should include not just your overall bounce rate, but also metrics like time on page, pages per session, and conversion rates. These metrics can provide a more comprehensive view of user engagement, and give you some clues about where — and why — people are dropping off. 

Conduct regular customer surveys and feedback sessions. Direct input from your audience can provide insights that aren't apparent from quantitative data alone. Use this feedback to identify areas of your site that may be causing confusion or failing to meet visitor expectations.

You should also regularly review and update your positioning. Markets evolve, customer needs change, and your positioning should reflect these shifts. What worked six months ago may not be as effective today.

Remember, reducing bounce rates is about creating a better, more engaging experience for your visitors. By continuously improving your site based on data and user feedback, you can create a website that attracts visitors, keeps them engaged, and moves through your sales funnel.

What is a Good Bounce Rate? Keeping Bounce Rates Low with Winning Website Messaging

The benchmarks we discussed early in this post should give you a general idea of whether your pages are hitting the mark or setting off alarm bells. If your rates are higher than you’d like, focusing on making sure every page has a clear next step and that your messaging is dialed into the needs and pain points of your target buyer will help you get them back down into those benchmark ranges. 

By following the five steps we've outlined in this post, you're well-equipped to tackle the number one culprit behind sky-high bounce rates: ineffective website messaging. 

But don't stop here. Your website's performance is a crucial factor in your overall business growth. If you're hungry for more insights into how your website is performing and how it stacks up against your competitors, we've got you covered. 

Take advantage of our free resource, the Growth Grader, to comprehensively assess your site’s performance across all the key growth metrics.

Your journey to lower bounce rates and higher engagement starts now. Check out the Growth Grader for free today!