What is Bounce Rate in Digital Marketing? And How to Reduce It?
Bounce rate is a fascinating topic to discuss, especially because, in many cases, it is completely overlooked in strategies.
Well, not entirely ignored. It is quite common in marketing departments and digital marketing agencies to monitor bounce rate, but even more common to not take action to improve it.
Bounce Rate is a very important metric that directly correlates with the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
When ignored, as it often is, you lose effectiveness—in the case of emails—and even domain authority—in the case of website bounces.
Today, we’ll dive deeper into this subject and understand how bounce rate impacts your digital marketing efforts.
And then, we’ll go further by discussing how to improve this critical metric for your work.
Let’s get started!
What is Bounce Rate?
“Bounce” is an English word that means “to rebound.”
Using this metaphor makes it easier to understand its meaning.
Think of a dartboard. You have five darts in hand and need to hit all five. You hit the first three, but the last two bounce off the board. 🎯
Understanding bounce rate is like viewing your website or email campaign as that dartboard.
For emails, every recipient who successfully receives your email is a dart that sticks to the board.
For websites, the darts that stick are users who visit your site and navigate beyond the first page instead of leaving after just one.
Outside the analogy, bounce rate (also called rejection rate) refers to the percentage of people who either did not receive your email or left your website after viewing only one page.
Let’s explore some finer details now. Come along:
Difference Between Website Bounce Rate and Email Bounce Rate
First, a clarification: Rejection Rate and Bounce Rate are synonyms.
Both terms describe the same concept in the scenarios mentioned above.
However, the difference between email and website bounce rates is significant. Let’s examine each more closely.
For email, when a recipient cannot receive the message, it is marked as a bounce by email marketing platforms.
The reasons for this can vary widely and may not even relate to your marketing strategy.
For websites, the story is quite different. Google Analytics 4 determines what counts as a bounce.
Google defines a bounce as users who visit your site and leave after viewing just one page.
We’ll delve deeper into this throughout the article to clear up any confusion, okay?
For now, let’s address another common question:
Is There a Connection Between Bounce Rate and Session Duration?
Session Duration or Time on Site is another Google Analytics metric that relates to user behavior on your website.
As its name implies, it measures the average time users spend on a session on your site.
However, bounce rate (which Analytics also calls Rejection Rate) is closely tied to this metric—they’re almost inseparable.
Here’s how it works: Google Analytics uses bounce rate to calculate session duration.
Or rather, it excludes users counted in the bounce rate from session duration.
In other words, if a user visits your site and doesn’t navigate to another page, they are not included in session duration metrics.
Now that we’ve clarified this primary distinction, let’s delve deeper into bounce rate cases.
Starting with your website. Follow along:
Bounce Rate on Your Website
As discussed, website bounce rate (or rejection rate, its synonym) indicates the percentage of users who visit your site and leave without viewing additional pages.
This is a commonly ignored metric in digital marketing, especially among beginners.
Even experienced marketers often pay less attention to website bounce rates than email bounce rates.
Why? The main reason is the perceived difficulty of implementing CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) improvements on a website.
Or, more accurately, the perceived difficulty. CRO is much simpler than it seems, as we’ve demonstrated in our comprehensive guide on the subject.
As a result, rejection rate becomes a supplementary metric, rarely highlighted in meetings, as even stakeholders often disregard it.
But experienced marketers pay close attention to this rate. It’s crucial for your conversion rates and the overall effectiveness of your strategy.
Below, we’ll discuss everything related to website bounce rate—what causes it and how to improve it. Let’s dive in:
Why Does It Happen?
Many factors contribute to bounce rate in email marketing.
Some are unique to your website, making it challenging to provide specific reasons without understanding your situation.
However, there are general causes of bounce rate. We’ve listed a few below, along with a quick note worth considering:
- Poor user experience
- Confusing layout
- Slow page loading times
- Misleading descriptions
- Lack of CTAs to other pages
- Absence of a conversion chatbot
- Shallow content
- Normal user distractions
- And other specific issues
It’s also important to consider the natural behavior of Google users and visitors to your site.
Most traffic comes from Google when you’ve implemented solid SEO and SEM strategies.
From Google, visitors might simply have their questions answered on one page and leave.
Therefore, your site’s bounce rate will always exist. The goal is to keep it under control.
Where to Measure?
The best way to measure your bounce rate is directly in Google Analytics.
However, this information is not displayed by default; a quick configuration is needed to access it and its sibling metric, Engagement Rate.
This tutorial from Google explains the procedure, but here’s a quick summary:
- Log in to Google Analytics and select your property.
- Click on Reports in the left menu.
- Choose the report you want to customize.
- Open the report and click the Customize button in the upper-right corner.
- A menu will open:
- Click Metrics, then Add Metric, and select Bounce Rate from the dropdown menu.
Done! Your report will now include bounce rate as a displayed metric.
How to Improve?
Improving bounce rate is an ongoing process that requires hypothesis creation, testing solutions, and tracking results.
It’s a continuous cycle.
Improving bounce rate involves addressing all the factors mentioned in the first point of this topic.
There’s no magic formula or single big change that will fix everything. You need to invest in overall site improvement, okay?
One quick improvement is installing a chatbot on your site to assist users during their visit.
With a chatbot, you can recommend other pages at any stage of the marketing funnel while users navigate.
This simultaneously reduces bounce rate and serves as a powerful ally for site-wide conversion efforts.
Bounce Rate in Email Marketing
The Bounce Rate in email marketing, although not as ignored as on websites, is a metric that often takes a backseat.
There is a very simple reason for this. Most of the work in digital marketing is done to generate leads and then nurture them with automations.
Having a list of leads is the result of those efforts.
So, once the lead list is formed, many people postpone the task of checking it, cleaning it, and maintaining it to avoid the Bounce.
This has a significant impact on your email marketing campaigns.
When your Bounce Rate in email increases too much, email providers like Gmail and Outlook start to recognize your sends as spam.
Landing in the spam folder means losing all the investment made in a campaign. It’s that simple.
It’s important to keep your Bounce Rate low to avoid this issue. This is the complete opposite of the Bounce Rate on a website, which is usually much higher without causing major problems.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. In the upcoming sections, we will take a closer look at the Bounce Rate in email marketing and understand how to solve it.
Then, we’ll talk about some benchmarks to understand what Bounce Rates are acceptable for both email and websites.
Let’s dive in:
Why does it happen?
The main reason for the Bounce Rate in emails is the inclusion of non-existent emails in your lead list.
These emails can appear in your list for various reasons, including:
- Deactivated emails;
- Leads that signed up with fake emails;
- The lead’s inbox is full;
- Server issues from either the sender or receiver;
- The sender is blocked by the receiver’s provider;
- Auto-reply settings;
- Other rarer reasons, but these are the main ones.
However, the most common causes are deactivated and fake emails.
But it’s also important to understand that landing in the spam folder, although bad, is still just a problem.
If you keep sending emails to these addresses, you could eventually be blocked by the provider and be unable to send emails to anyone.
This is, however, quite rare. Typically, companies stay in users’ spam folders for years before being completely blocked.
But let’s understand better how to measure the Bounce Rate in email marketing?
Where to measure?
The best way to send email marketing is through specific platforms for this purpose.
These platforms provide all sending data per campaign, including the Bounce Rate.
They also usually alert you if your list contains many emails that have bounced.
That’s why they are the best way to send out emails. Not to mention, of course, the convenience.
How to improve it?
There are some simple ways, and others a little more complex, to improve the Bounce Rate in email marketing.
It’s important to note, however, that these methods work in two different ways:
- Proactively: This is when you take steps to prevent the Bounce Rate from increasing;
- Reactively: This is when you take steps to reduce the Bounce Rate you already have.
Let’s talk about these two strategies in the following items:
Periodic List Cleaning
The B2B segment is one of the most affected by outdated emails because it deals mainly with corporate emails.
Corporate emails are deactivated much more frequently than personal emails due to employee turnover.
An employee may convert on an offer you’ve defined and a year later leave the company. That email remains in your database and will cause a bounce.
That’s why it’s important to clean your list periodically. Cleaning it every three months is a good practice.
To do this, create a separate list with the emails flagged as Hard Bounces by your platform.
A Hard Bounce mainly indicates deactivated emails. It happens when the platform will no longer attempt delivery.
By organizing this list, you can try sending a final rescue email. It’s the famous “Hey, long time no see!”.
Those who respond or click your CTA go back to the main list, and those who don’t can be deleted.
This is the main reactive action you can take.
Double Opt-in
Double opt-in is when you ask for email confirmation from the lead at the moment of conversion.
It’s like the process of creating an account on a website. You register, everything is fine, but then you need to check your email to confirm the registration.
Most lead generation platforms offer this feature very simply.
The tricky part of working with it is that you may lose leads due to the difficulty of the process.
This is the main proactive action you can take.
Is there a benchmark for Bounce Rates?
There are certainly various benchmarks for Bounce Rates across the internet.
The issue is that most of them look at a segment in a very general way, which can lead to significant disparities.
Another problem is that most available benchmarks come from global markets, so it’s rare to find localized data.
This is tricky because, in many cases, the Bounce Rate on websites is influenced by the region you’re in.
Local services with SEO work that doesn’t consider location-based keywords, for example, can show up across Brazil, increasing the Bounce Rate to levels that can invalidate analysis.
But even with these caveats, it’s worth knowing some Bounce Rate benchmarks for both email and websites to at least have a reference.
I gathered data from international research and summarized the key findings below:
Good Bounce Rates for Websites
I’ve separated some 2024 research here.
Each item is a different study that shows overall and industry-specific Bounce Rates.
Here are the findings from a Capturly survey:
As you can see, website Bounce Rates are generally quite high. The industry average is 70%.
At the same time, DataBox reports in another survey that a good Bounce Rate should be around 40%.
To be honest, these numbers are quite generous. It’s not very common to find rates like this in Brazil—here, they are closer to the previous research.
This DataBox survey was conducted in August 2023.
Another survey from Claspo in 2023 showed more variable data, but all around 40% to 60%:
It’s also important to understand that different areas of your website will have different Bounce Rates.
Your Support page, for example, is likely to have a high Bounce Rate due to its nature—people enter, leave a request, and exit.
Similarly, individual blog articles will have a high Bounce Rate since their main purpose is to answer a specific user query.
However, at the same time, the Engagement Rate (the opposite of Bounce Rate) on blogs is very valuable because most interactions on this content result in lead generation.
🤿 Deep Dive: Blog to Generate Leads — 10 Essential Strategies
Good Bounce Rates for Email Marketing
The truth is that understanding the average Bounce Rates for email is somewhat futile.
The general understanding in the industry is that any value above 2% is already concerning.
The Bounce Rate in an email should be zero or close to zero.
But that’s not possible. Rarely will you find a case like this, since you are dealing with hundreds of emails in your list.
2% is when your list starts to be considered “dirty,” and you will begin to face issues like ending up in the spam folder and having delivery blocks.
Always try to stay as close to zero as possible, and if you start getting close to 2%, it’s time to clean your list.
An important point: don’t be afraid to clean your list. Don’t feel bad about email!
It’s okay, you might lose an email or two by mistake here and there, but that’s a very valid tradeoff when the alternative is to dirty up the entire list.
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So, how are your Bounce Rates?
Leave yours in the comments so we can think together about ways to improve them.
Or, of course, if they’re great, share what you’ve done to help others as well.
And what do you think about checking out our data? We did an open benchmark at the end of last year, and you can access it now by clicking the banner below.
These are our real data, which we made available for everyone to analyze in this webinar.
I’ll be waiting for you, okay? Thanks so much for reading, and I’ll see you in the next article!
