Your website bounce rate is lying to you

Your bounce rate is lying to you. In fact, it's been lying to you for probably 10 years, if not 20 years now, and it's not measuring what you think it is. And the number most business owners actually need to watch, well, it's not even on your Google Analytics by default, which leaves you with a gap, don't it? Because if the number you've been panicking about isn't the one that really matters, then what is the number that matters? And if you answer that, everything about how you judge a website completely changes.

So, I've been building websites since about 2006, probably even before that, and I've sat across more clients than I can count, all staring at a big red bounce rate number, convinced that that's why their website isn't working. And it's because their agency told them or the marketing manager flagged it, and now the whole room is treating bounce rate like it's DEFCON 1 or 5 or whichever the most important one is. And it really isn't DEFCON 1 or 5, because before this video's done, I'll show you exactly why, and I'll give you the one number that actually tells you if your website is doing its job. I've also got a brilliant client story bunged in here as well that sums up exactly where this obsession with bounce rate ends. And I'll tell you now, it didn't end well for me or for them.

Wrong number. So, you'll have definitely been here before. You've opened up Google Analytics, everything looks vaguely fine, and then somebody either somebody from your agency or a marketing manager or some well-meaning but ultimately a tosser on LinkedIn points at the bounce rate and says, "That bounce rate is too high. You need to fix that." And then suddenly you're in meetings about bounce rate, you're getting reports about bounce rate, and you're being told to restructure your entire website and indeed business all around fixing a high bounce rate. Now, the term bounce rate being high has long since been something that people have pointed to me about with a big red number and gone, "You need to fix this." But before I tell you to bin off the concept of bounce rate completely, let me just quickly explain what bounce rate actually is because most people don't know what it is.

And once you actually understand what it is, you'll understand why I want you to stop caring about the whole concept of bounce rate. Still a failure. So, here is the definition of bounce rate and this actually comes from the old world. I'm going to call it old world. That's Universal Analytics.

That's the version of Google Analytics that existed for the best part of around a decade before Google shut it down in 2023 and moved everyone over to the version of Analytics that you're looking at right now, which is GA4. Now, in that old world of Universal Analytics, bounce rate measured one simple thing. Somebody visited one page on your website then left the entire website without visiting another page. That was it. So, think of your website as a room.

They entered a room and then they left the building. They never came back. And if that happens, that increases the percentage of the bounce rate on your website, which means bounce rate equals high. Now, I know what you're thinking already. Why the [ __ ] does that even matter?

What if somebody just came to your website and did the entire transaction on one page and then left the website? That's a quick, efficient process, right? Surely that's good, isn't it? Bounce rate doesn't always mean bad. Let me give you a real example.

On the homepage of the Ruckley Law website, it's a client of mine, there's a form right at the top of the homepage. You can go to the homepage for the first ever time desperately needing legal help. You can fill the form in and then leave the website. Now, in the eyes of old Universal Analytics, that would be considered a bounce. It's also a lead, though.

So, should I have made these people click through to another page so the bounce rate wouldn't go high? Of course [ __ ] not. That's stupid. It's easier for them to do it right there on the homepage so we let them do it. That visit to the website, they land on the homepage, perform an action, and then leave is a success, but the old metric of Universal Analytics of bounce rate would have called that a failure.

I think you've probably seen the problem here, but Google also saw the problem. So, bounce rate got so misleading in Universal Analytics that in GFR, they've essentially scrapped the entire concept. They've buried it off the main reports, and they've replaced it with something called engagement rate, which is more or less the exact opposite of bounce rate. Now, a session counts as engaged if somebody visits a web page for longer than 10 seconds, fills in a form, or looks at a second page. So, if we go back to that Rockledge Law visitor, the old number would have called it a bounce.

Under GFR, that's considered engagement, and it's a win. I know this is ridiculous, right? Because it's the same visit, it's the same human, it's the same person doing the same thing. They filled out a form on the home page. One system called that a failure, and the next one calls it a success, and this tells you everything you really need to know about this particular number.

Google have redefined the entire concept of bounce rate because it was broken, and even the new one still doesn't answer the only question that matters, which is, "Did your website make you any money?" Half missing. We'll come back to the money question in a little bit because that's the whole point, and that's where this entire video is heading. But first, there's a second problem. Even if bounce rate meant something, you couldn't fully trust the number anyway. I know this because every month I look at Google Analytics, and I look at it for about 80 of our websites.

I look across all of the properties, and I look at the actual leads that those businesses are bringing in as well. So, I go away because I'm a nerd, and I like looking at the real emails and the real inquiries that came into the inbox. Analytics is usually reporting about 60 or 80% of those leads because most people are blocking analytics in more ways than ever, and they're far more savvy about it than they used to be. So, the full picture that we used to get from analytics, I'll be direct, is literally half of the picture now. Now, this isn't a conspiracy.

This is just the way it is now. We're tracking less than ever through analytics because we can't track through analytics. Safari, just as one example, which is installed on every iPhone and Mac, has a built-in feature called intelligent tracking prevention. In plain terms, that's limiting how long Google can follow a visitor after they've landed on your website. By default, it's 7 days, but if they come to your website via a paid ad, it drops to 24 hours.

So, the analytics code will still load, but it's just quietly missing the data off it, basically. And then if you add browsers in like Brave browser, Firefox, ad blockers, privacy extensions, and let's not forget anybody who clicks reject all on the cookie banner, well, we're losing a [ __ ] load of data here. So, why is everybody still looking at bounce rate? Why does anybody still mention bounce rate? Now, that bit baffles me, but I think I have an explanation.

Bad advice. So, now we both agree that bounce rate is unreliable and misleading, everybody still talks about it though. And there's a good reason for this. So, web agencies like mine, but not like mine, especially the ones that love the sound of their own voice, um they like parroting outdated advice. Now, that's definitely not me.

This whole concept of bounce rate equaling bad came from the Universal Analytics era. As I said, it was before GFR, it was before GDPR, it was before half of your visitors are getting blocked by all this tracking by default. But, it sounds technical, doesn't it? And it sounds like something worth fixing. So, if your agency is coming to you with this red number and they're going, "Look, the bounce rate is bad.

We need to fix this number." Well, it keeps you paying them for another month, doesn't it? So, there's lots of, let's say, unscrupulous agencies out there that look for these figures that look bad, so they can point you to them and say, "We need to lower the bounce rate." Or, they want to win you as a client and they say, "Well, your bounce rate is bad, so you must need a new website." But, that's not the real damage that's actually happening. The real damage is that it's not just wasting your time on a useless number. It's actually pointing you in really completely the wrong direction because you are chasing a lower bounce rate. Now, to fix a lower bounce rate, you spread your content across the website across multiple pages.

So, now you have a lot of pages on your website with the content spread too thinly, which would have just been better to just be on a single page with a hell of a lot of information and not spread across the website. So, now you're actually making your website actively worse by chasing a better score on a metric that doesn't even matter that's also misleading. What a mess, right? I've watched this play out in real time with a client, in fact, many clients over the years, but I do have one specific example that I think's probably worth sharing. Chasing the score.

Okay, so the story goes, I had a client, we'd taken over their website from another agency, but this particular client was obsessed with checking their analytics every single month. So, they'd constantly be coming at me with figures that didn't really matter other than bounce rate. Now, this was back in the Universal Analytics days that I spoke about before, where bounce rate was one of the top figures that came to the top of every report. So, every month I had the same conversation with them. "Craig, the bounce rate's too high.

What are you going to do about it?" "Craig, just just have a look at this bounce rate. Should we fix it?" And every month I told them exactly the same thing. "Right now, you're getting zero leads from your website. That's the real problem that you need to fix." But, they just kept coming to me and saying, "Craig, no, you're wrong. We need to fix the bounce rate." Why are they so obsessed with the bounce rate?

Where does this come from? And then it clicked with me one day. They they'd heard bounce rate is bad so many times on places like LinkedIn, places like YouTube like this. In fact, if you go on YouTube and look up bounce rate, there's millions of videos about it. They'd heard people talking about bounce rate so many times and bounce rate is bad, especially from their old agency, that they'd basically just internalized it.

I was telling them that they needed more content on their website and they needed better case studies and testimonials on their website to improve their website and bring about leads. But, instead, they were obsessing over the bounce rate number and suffice to say that relationship between us didn't last very long. But, if I was being kind to them and we had a minute now, and we do have a minute, I'd tell them to just delete Google Analytics because I I'm No, I mean it. I just delete Google Analytics because if analytics is making you focus on the entirely wrong thing, the entirely wrong number, it's actively hurting you. It's actively hurting your business.

It's actively hurting your website. What you actually needed to do, and what they needed to do in those instances, was just fill the website will full of things that the customer wants to see. And if you don't know what the customer wants to see, go and find out. So, do some client interviews with past, present, current customers. Get transcripts from sales calls.

Go to Google and look at the Google reviews and look at the content of those Google reviews and see what people are saying. Figure out what your potential customers want to know, what keeps them up at night, what proof they need, how it needs what it needs to look like, and then just put that on your website. That's what drives inquiries, not a lower bounce rate, and it never [ __ ] did. Even when it actually was tracked 100% bounce rate, it never even mattered then. It was just a lie we were all telling ourselves.

The real problem was never engagement or bounce rate, it was just proof, and they're just not the same thing at all, which brings me to the number I actually want you to track instead, and it's just one number, count. Here's the metric you should be counting. This is the only one that matters. How many leads has your website generated this week? And that might be form fills, inquiries, phone calls if you track them.

Whatever a lead looks like for your business, everything else doesn't matter. So, sessions, visitors, bounce rate, engagement rate, time on page, all of that is noise most of the time, but especially right now when you're getting no leads, all of that is noise until you start getting leads through the website, and until you start tracking whether you are getting leads through your website. There's a bit of a catch to this, and the reason why most people don't track it is because GFR doesn't really track this kind of thing by default. So, the way you need to do this properly is to get your contact form to send a signal to GFR every time somebody fills it in. Most form tools out there, like Gravity Forms or whatever else, or CRMs do this straight out of the box, but if it can't be done, you can just speak to a web developer, and they'll be able to get this wired up in a couple of hours with something like Google Tag Manager.

And then you need to flag that in GFR as a key event, which is just GFR's word for an action that matters, and then it will show up in your reports. So, even when you get this set up correctly, not every form fill comes through, because some people are going to be blocking analytics, and there's nothing really we can do about that. So, that's why you need to also look at your emails or wherever it reports on how many form fills or inquiries you get, check that against your analytics every single month, or every week you can just write it down. I mean, literally on a piece of paper, keep a note on your desk, a spreadsheet, whatever you want to do, about how many inquiries your website has drove this week. And every week you're writing zero down.

Another week, zero. Another week, zero. And then eventually you'll get sick of writing zero down so much that you'll actually do something about fixing the zero on your website. Bounce rate was just built for a different era. It was built before privacy tools were blocking half of your data.

It was built before GFR even existed, and it was built before everybody started banging on about GDPR. Whether you agree with it or not, it's here. Now you're thinking, "Okay, leads are my goal, but my website isn't set up to get them in the first place." That's your next problem to deal with. And I've already made that video. It's called zero website leads, ask these questions.

And it's exactly what it says on the tin. Watch this next. It's popping up where my finger is right now. Don't go look at bounce rate. Look at your leads instead.

That number will tell you everything that bounce rate never could. But in the meantime, and whilst I'm talking now, go watch that next video because I'm just talking and filling space right now. Just so you have plenty of time to go click that Click that, yeah. Click that video here. That's