Analytics Glossary

Bounce Rate

The share of visits that end where they began — and when that’s actually fine.

Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions where a visitor lands on a page and leaves without interacting further — no second page view, no click, no scroll event. If 100 people land on your pricing page and 62 leave without doing anything else, that page has a 62% bounce rate.

Bounce rate is the most misread metric in analytics, because a bounce is not automatically bad. Someone who searches “bakery opening hours”, lands on your contact page, reads the hours, and leaves got exactly what they wanted — and counted as a bounce. Context decides: a high bounce rate on a blog post might be normal (people read the article and leave), but a high bounce rate on a product page could indicate a problem.

Rough benchmarks by page type: 26–40% is excellent for most sites, 41–55% is about average, and 56–70% is on the high side for pages meant to lead somewhere. Blog posts and articles commonly run 70–90%, landing pages 60–90%, and online-store product pages 30–55%. Judge each page against the range for its job, not against a single site-wide number.

How it works

Crafty Meerkat calculates bounce rate automatically and surfaces it on your Analytics overview, so you can quickly identify pages that may need attention. Because the tracking script also records scroll and click events, a visitor who reads your whole article without clicking anywhere is not lumped in with someone who left after two seconds — engagement counts, which makes the number fairer to content pages than tools that only count second page views.

How to put it to work

1
Find the pages that shouldn’t bounce
Ignore the site-wide average at first. Look at bounce rate on the pages with a job to do — pricing, services, product pages — where a high number means lost customers.
2
Match the page to the promise
Check what referrer or campaign sends traffic to a high-bounce page. If an ad promises “same-day repairs” and the page opens with your company history, visitors bounce. Make the first screen answer the click.
3
Give visitors an obvious next step
Add one clear link or button above the fold — “See prices”, “Book a call”, “Read the guide”. Pages without a next step earn bounces by default.
4
Check speed and mobile
Slow pages bounce before they finish loading. Compare the page’s numbers on the Speed view, and check the device breakdown — a page that bounces mostly on mobile usually has a mobile layout problem.

Tips from the den

◆A very low bounce rate (under 20%) on every page is usually a measurement quirk, not brilliance — be suspicious of numbers that look too good.
◆Pair bounce rate with scroll depth: high bounce with deep scrolling means people read and left satisfied; high bounce with shallow scrolling means the page lost them immediately.
◆Fix one page at a time. Improving your worst high-traffic page moves the site-wide number more than polishing ten small ones.

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Common questions

What is a good bounce rate?

For most small-business sites, 26–40% is excellent and 41–55% is normal. But it varies hugely by page type — 80% on a blog post can be perfectly healthy, while 80% on a pricing page deserves attention. Compare each page to others doing the same job.

Does a bounce mean the visitor was unhappy?

Not necessarily. Visitors who find what they need on one page — opening hours, a phone number, an answer in an article — bounce satisfied. Bounce rate flags pages to investigate, not verdicts.

How is bounce rate different from exit rate?

A bounce is a one-page session with no interaction. An exit is simply the last page of any session, however long. Every bounce is an exit, but a visitor who views five pages and leaves from your checkout exited without bouncing.