5

Found a website with 4% bounce rate over a 5 month period, getting a little over a 1000 visits a week with most visitors coming from organic search results. Is that even possible? I never seen a bounce rate so low. The website itself has just an image, horizontal nav (6 items) and a introduction paragraph with a bullet list on the home page. 60% of the visitors land on the home page.

What could cause such low bounce rate? (not that's a bad thing).

gdaniel
  • 411
  • 6
  • 14

2 Answers2

3

Does the website meet the the visitors expectations and fulfill their needs? If so, why wouldn't you expect a low bounce rate?

Maybe this website doesn't have "genuine" visitors. It may just appear that way.

spike.y
  • 131
  • 2
  • I would expect a low bounce rate, but it would be around 20% to 30% which is already above normal. I would not expect 4%, not with most there traffic coming from organic searches only. – gdaniel May 16 '14 at 15:04
3

For that to be legitimate traffic, the page would have to serve a market with almost no competition. Meaning almost everyone who lands on the page meant to find that specific website.

If it's legitimate traffic, a low bounce rate is explainable when the homepage doesn't serve the end-users needs, but other pages on the site do serve the need. The limited first page content requires the user to click past the homepage, which eliminates the bounce. The users must really want whatever that website is providing, but 4% still seems unrealistically low.

JMC
  • 3,280
  • 1
  • 19
  • 19
  • 1
    I did a little digging around last night and JMC hit the nail on the head. As well, some sites use tricks such as pop-ups, disabling the back alt+left arrow, create junk landing pages specifically to rank high in the SERPs, extremely slow load times, and so on. Generally, a low bounce rate would be about %20-%40 or higher depending upon industry. For some, a high bounce rate is actually the goal- that is to satisfy the users search quickly and precisely. Often these sites get more return visitors if done well. Still there are sites with single digit bounce rates and they fit JMC's descripton. – closetnoc May 16 '14 at 15:27