Bounce rate is a metric that can be hard to pin down and optimize. Many marketers don’t truly dive into it as a topic, which is a lost opportunity as far as website design goes.

Most companies have Google Analytics set up for their websites; if you do, you know what your bounce rate is. But do you know what it really means, or how to improve it? What about your industry’s bounce rate benchmarks and how you compare?

Here’s an overview of what bounce rate is, a range of benchmarks for it, and how you can improve yours. We’ll also show you how to capture high-quality B2B leads who are exiting your website without converting.

Website Bounce Rate Benchmarks (and How to Capture Exiting B2B Leads)

First of all, what is bounce rate?

Google Analytics defines it as the percentage of website visits that are single-page. In other words, the percentage of your website visits where someone only visits the page they initially landed on before exiting your site.

So if someone visits your home page and then exits without clicking to anywhere else on your site, that’s a bounce.

“Exit” covers a range of possible actions, such as clicking back to a search results page, closing the browser window, typing in a new URL, clicking an outbound link, and others. Regardless of the action, the net result is that they only see one page of your site.

How to Calculate Bounce Rate

Even if you have Google Analytics calculating it for you, it’s a good idea to understand how it’s calculated.

Bounce rate is the number of single-page visits (i.e. bounces) divided by the total number of page visits.

Website Bounce Rate Benchmarks

Average bounce rates differ by industry and by page type (whether it’s a blog, a landing page, and so on), so pinning down exactly what qualifies as a “good” bounce rate can be hard.

The average bounce rate of an average website is 40.5%. Here’s a quick overview of some ballpark figures for website types:

Retail sites with solidly-targeted traffic: 20 – 40% bounce rate.
Sites selling lead generation services: 30-50% bounce rate.
Basic landing pages: 70 – 90% bounce rate.
B2B websites: 25 – 55% bounce rate.
Blogs: 65 – 90% bounce rate.

Your industry is also a major factor in your probable bounce rate. There’s a major difference in average bounce rates between real estate and sports websites, for example. A few approximate industry-average bounce rates:

Business/Industry: 50% bounce rate.
News: 58% bounce rate.
Real Estate: 5% bounce rate.
Science: 62% bounce rate.
Computers/Electronics: 5% bounce rate.

What Factors Impact Bounce Rate?

Overall, the biggest thing that influences your bounce rate is your website’s user experience. For example, page load time is a huge factor in bounce rates. The longer it takes your page to fully load, the more people are going to exit before it’s done.

Here are some factors that impact bounce rate:

Page load times are a major factor. Longer load times directly lead to a much higher bounce rate.
Pop-ups/autoplay can immediately drive people away. Music or videos that auto-stream when someone enters your site is something very few visitors will put up with.
Page design plays a role too. If your page doesn’t seamlessly fit with what your visitor clicked on to get there – or they can’t easily find what they’re looking for – they’ll probably bounce.
Links to external sites drive up your bounce rate simply because if someone lands on that page and then clicks on an external link – and that link doesn’t open in a new tab – that counts as a bounce.
Search engine rank for irrelevant keywords can bring traffic to your pages that will bounce once they realize the page isn’t what they were looking for.
Make sure your audience is right for your website in your advertisements as well. In general, if your ads are appearing to the wrong audience, your bounce rate will be very high.

It’s well worth taking some time to optimize your website’s user experience.

How to Capture Exiting B2B Leads

Some website bounces are due to the content not actually being relevant to the visitor. What about the ones who could have been high-quality leads? They enter your site, read a bit and exit again without converting on a form.

That’s where Clickback WEB comes in. It allows you to capture B2B leads that would otherwise have exited without converting, even if they’ve only visited one page.

It identifies companies that visit your website and gives you accurate contact information for their key decision makers.

You can filter them by website behavior as well as company attributes. So for example if you’re experiencing a high volume of irrelevant traffic, you can filter your visits based on a certain amount of time spent on your website in order to target more relevant leads.

That’s just scratching the surface of what Clickback WEB can do for you. Try it out for yourself with a 14-day free trial, including a 1-on-1 demo with one of our experts.