I’ve read many articles stating a link between faster page loading and better user engagement, but with limited evidence. So I looked at hard data from 1,840 websites and found that there’s really no correlation between page load speed and bounce rate in Google Analytics. The oft quoted statistic on page load speed is from Amazon, where each 100ms of extra loading delay supposed to cost Amazon $160m. Except that the research is from 2006, when Amazon’s pages were very static, and users had different expectations from pages – plus the conclusions may not apply to different kinds of sites. More recently in 2013, Intuit presented results at the Velocity conference of how reducing page load speed from 15 seconds to 2 seconds had increased customer conversion by: +3% conversions for every second reduced from 15 seconds to 7 seconds +2% conversions for every second reduced from seconds 7 to 5 +1% conversions for every second reduced from seconds 4 to 2 So reducing load speed from 15 seconds to 7 seconds was worth an extra 24% conversion, but only another 8% to bring 7 seconds down to 2 seconds. Does page speed affect bounce rate? We collected data from 1,840 Google Analytics web properties, where both the full page load time (the delay between the first request and all the items on the page are loaded) and the bounce rate were within normal range. We then applied a Spearman’s Rank Correlation test to see if being a higher ranked site for speed (lower page load time) made a site more likely to be a higher ranked site for bounce rate (lower bounce rate). What we found is almost no correlation (0.18) between page load speed and bounce rate. This same result was found if we looked at the correlation (0.22) between bounce rate and the delay before page content starts appearing (time to DOM ready) So what explains the lack of a link? I have three theories 1. Users care more about content than speed Many of the smaller websites we sampled for this research operate in niche industries or locations, where they may be the only source of information on a given topic. As a user, if I already know the target site is my best source for a topic, then I’ll be very patient while the content loads. One situation where users are not patient is when arriving from Google Search, and they know they can go and find a similar source of information in two clicks (one back to Google, and then out to another site). So we see a very high correlation between bounce rate and the volume of traffic from Google Search. This also means that what should concern you is speed relative to your search competitors, so you could be benchmarking your site speed against a group of similar websites, to measure whether you are above or below average. [subscribe]   2. Bounce rate is most affected by first impressions As a user landing on your site I am going to make some critical decisions within the first 3 seconds: would I trust this site, is this the product or content I was expecting, and is it going to be easy to find what I need. If your page can address these questions quickly – by good design and fast loading of the title, main image etc – then you buy some more time before my attention wanders to the other content. In 2009, Google tried an experiment to show 30 search results to users instead of 10, but found the users clicking on the results dropped by 20%. They attributed this to the half a second extra it took to load the pages. But the precise issue was likely that it took half a second to load the first search result. Since users of Google mainly click on the first 3 results, the important metric is how long it took to load those – not the full page load.   3. Full page load speed is increasingly hard to measure Many websites already use lazy loading of images and other non-blocking loading techniques to make sure the bare bones of a page is fast to load, especially on a mobile device, before the chunkier content (like images and videos) are loaded. This means the time when a page is ready for the user to interact is not a hard line. SpeedCurve, a tool focussed entirely on web page speed performance, has a more accurate way of tracking when the page is ‘visually complete’ based on actual filmstrips on the page loading. But in their demo of The Guardian page speed, the page is not visually complete until a video advert has rendered in the bottom right of the screen – and personally I’d be happy to use the page before then. What you can do with Google Analytics is send custom timing events, maybe after the key product image on a page has loaded, so you can measure speed as relevant to your own site.   But doesn’t speed still affect my Google rankings? Yes, slightly. But when Google incorporated speed as a ranking signal in 2010, their head of SEO explained it was likely to penalise only 1% of websites which were really slow. And my guess is in 7 years Google has increase the sophistication with which it measures ‘speed’. So overall you shouldn’t worry about page load times on their own. A big increase may still signal a problem, but you should be focussing on conversion rates or page engagement as a safer metric. If you do want to measure speed, try to define a custom speed measurement for the content of your site – and Littledata’s analytics experts can work with you to set that custom reporting up.

The bounce rate is the number of web sessions where the user left your site after viewing just one page. It is a key measure for landing page engagement. This is the second article in the Q&A series. As I previous mentioned, I am going to continue answering some of the most-asked questions about Google Analytics and how it works. If you want to get an idea of how this works, you can visit PART 1(Pros and cons of using Google Analytics) of the series and see what questions we answered there. Here are the questions we will be tackling in this second article of the series: 1) What is the bounce rate in Google Analytics? 2) How is the Bounce rate calculated? 3) What is an ideal bounce rate? What is the bounce rate in Google Analytics? The definition of the Bounce Rate as shown in the Google Analytics Help Centre is “the percentage of single-page sessions. Those are sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with any other page”. Why is this metric important? A high bounce rate shows you may have some problems on your website. Remember that the bounce rate is correlated to the content of your website and should be considered in the context of the purpose of the website. If you have a content website, a services website or an ecommerce website you need to look at the bounce rate in the big picture and analyse it using Advanced Segments to look at a specific category of pages, and see how they’re performing vs other sections. Some reasons for a high bounce rate are: Single page website: where the user never leaves the first page through their whole visit. A high bounce rate, in this case, is actually irrelevant: you should focus on how many visitors. In order to find out how people interact with your website, you can track Custom Events on the page. To get an accurate bounce rate in this case you need to set up the events as "interaction hits". Incorrect implementation: for a multiple page website, in order to track all the pages, you need to add a specific tracking code on all of the pages for a correct read of the data. In case the bounce rate is high, that might show that the tracking code is not correctly applied to all pages of the website. User Behaviour: the people that arrived on your site and left without doing anything else, either because they found the information that they wanted on that page and there was no need to access other pages or they simply entered by accident and didn’t find what they needed. Also if a user has a page bookmarked, enters the page and then leaves, that’s also counted as a bounce. Site design: when the implementation is done properly then you really might have a problem with the way the content is displayed. In this case consider looking at the landing pages, as they might not do justice to the content. Also, the keywords or ads that you use, might not reflect the content of your website and because of that, you need to optimise either the content or the keywords and ads. How is the Bounce rate calculated? In Google Analytics, there are two indicators for the Bounce Rate. There is the Bounce Rate of a Web Page and then there is the Bounce Rate of a Website. The Bounce Rate of a Website is the total number of bounces across all of the pages on the website over the total number of entrances across all the pages on the website (both over the same determined period of time). This is represented in Google Analytics as a percentage shown in the table of all the pages displayed. The Bounce Rate of a Web Page is the total number of bounces on a page over the total number of entrances on the page (Both over the same determined period of time). The image above shows the equation for calculating it. This is also represented as a percentage but it is shown in the table for each page separately. Here is an article from OptimizeSMART in which they show us how to improve our bounce rate. [subscribe] 3) What is an ideal bounce rate? As I previously explained, the bounce rate should be as low as possible. In one of his articles, Avinash Kaushik who is a guru of Analytics tells us what the ideal bounce rate should be: “As a benchmark from my own personal experience over the years, it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20%. Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying.” To recap, in this article we managed to see what the Bounce Rate is, how it’s calculated and what is the ideal bounce rate we should strive for with our website. Make sure to check part 3 out, in which we will answer more questions about Google Analytics. Happy Reporting. Get Social! Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and keep up-to-date with our Google Analytics insights.