A bounce rate refers to the ratio of number of visitors who leave a site after viewing just one page within an analysis of the site. A high bounce rate is often indicative of a poor user experience, irrelevant or inappropriate content, and often also refers to slow page load times. Once again, it sometimes depends on context, since a high bounce rate may be the natural outcome for any given single page site or blog. There are many ways to reduce bounce rates: optimising the general design of the website, improving load times, enhancing the online user’s experience through engaging content, and those ‘call to action’ buttons.
The bounce rate becomes a potential metric for a business as other complementary variables are used to examine possible areas for improvement in user engagement.