Bounce Rate Demystified: What are good benchmarks?

If you have your own website and using Google Analytics, you must know bounce rate for your website. But have you ever thought that what would be an average bounce rate for your industry? How is it calculated? What are the factors that affect bounce rate? & How anyone can reduce bounce rate for a website. To answer these common questions Kissmetrics has given below infographic to help you.

What is bounce rate?
The percentage of single page-visits (i.e. visits in which the person has left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate represents that the landing pages or entrances are not relevant to visitors.

What are bounce rate benchmarks?
According to below infographic, the average bounce rate is 40%, but your targeted bounce rate can vary as per your industry, it can be 40%, 30% or even 20%.

Go through below details to find more information about an average bounce rate, factors on which bounce rate depends and much more.

Now Link Your Google Analytics Account to Webmaster Tools

According to Webmaster Tools Central Blog, If you are a site owner and using same Google account for both Google Analytics & Google Webmaster Tools, then you can link your webmaster tool verified website to analytics profile for that website.

Now it is possible to access your analytics data through webmaster tools. You can directly access the referring sites report of your analytics profile through “Links to your site” page in webmaster tool.

Also you can easily access your analytics data without login to Google analytics account. You can simply access the analytics account from the navigation link on the top left of webmaster tools. In case of multiple website owners, each owner has to link its own webmaster profile to analytics account.

If you have a webmaster tools verified site and want to link it with Google analytics account. Just follow below 2 steps.

Go to the home page of webmaster tools, click on manage next to the site you want to connect with analytics account. Then click on Google analytics profile…

Then select the website profile and save it.

How to setup Goal and Funnel in Google Analytics?

All of us are aware of Google Analytics tool, which is used to measure any site’s traffic.

Goal is a useful metric which measures conversion rate of any website. Goals can measure your business sales, signups, newsletters subscriptions, enquiries etc. Goals can also track other actions of your website to which you want to track.

In every goal, we can define its steps. A funnel represents complete visualization of what is happening on every step of your goal. For example if a signup process consists of 3 steps, then a funnel will show you how many users have entered on step1, step2 and step3. It will also provide details of entry and exit pages on each step.

At first, you need to decide which goal you want to track and the conversion page. Usually conversion page is “thank you” page or the page which confirms that a conversion has been completed.

Secondly, you need to define the goal steps. Once you have completed the above process, login to your Google Analytics Account and start creating a goal.

In goal creation you need to select a match type from three options:

• Exact Match

• Head Match

• Regular Expression Match

Exact Match

It uses regex and not suitable for dynamic URLs.

Head Match

It does not use regex and matches the ‘head’ section of the page url.

Regular Expression Match

It uses regex and suitable for complex urls.

Then, you need to put the Goal URL according to the selected match type. After that you can give a desired name to goal and its value in terms of conversion.

If you want funnel visualization for your goal, you must fill the steps for that goal. There is a checkbox named “required step” is used to inform Google Analytics to only record the goal if the visitor has been entered through step1.

If you have not checked the “required step” checkbox then the funnel visualization will show you the entrance points, exit points and the drop off rate at each step. It will help you in identifying at which step you are loosing more visitors. Then you can improve your goal conversion rate by removing or improving that step.

One Important thing that is a visitor converts the same goal within the same session, it will count as a single goal conversion.

If you want to just test the goal initially, you can create a goal in website’s test profile. Once you are satisfied with your goal, you can implement it to your main profile.