Using The Bounce Rate Test For Measuring Your Product/Market Fit
The bounce rate is the percentage of users who visit a page on your product (for example, your home page) and then leave it before taking any primary action, such as registration or starting a free demo. It is a commonly used metric in traffic analysis. The bounce rate is calculated by counting the number of visits without any further action (in other words, visits with just one-page view) and dividing that by the total number of visits. The actual number is then represented as a percentage of total visits.
A high bounce rate typically indicates that the product is not doing a good enough job of attracting visitors. Whereas, the low bounce rate indicates that the visitor’s expectations are met and that the product is giving a nice first impression to its visitors. According to Customedialabs, the typical bounce rate for good performing e-commerce and retail products is 20% — 45%, for B2B products it is 25% — 55%, and for lead generation websites it is 30% — 55%.
Interestingly, the bounce rate tells a lot whether you are close to your product/market fit or not. The low bounce rate directly indicates how important is the problem you are trying to solve and how great your product messaging is. It doesn’t prove yet that your product offering is comparatively better than that of your competitors, but it is a good starting point. Typically, if your bounce rate is above 60%, then your product definitely has some issues.
However, having a high bounce rate doesn’t always necessarily mean that your product is not solving an important problem. Users can bounce because of multiple reasons such as poor design or poor content and/or product messaging. The 5 seconds test and the first-click test are common qualitative testing techniques to start investigating the issues with your bounce rate. You can easily create and run those tests using the UsabilityHub.
If you want to get quantitative insights, then tools such as Google Analytics can be really useful. Also, note that SimilarWeb is a website that will show you the bounce rate of a website for free. This can be useful when you want to compare your bounce rate with the bounce rate of your competitors. I tried it and matched the results with my analytics and the results were surprisingly accurate.
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Rafayel Mkrtchyan is a product management consultant who helps companies improve their product discovery and delivery processes. He teaches teams how to set up a winning product strategy, run customer and product development processes, as well as robust their lean, agile, and design thinking skills. Contact him via contact@productguy.io.
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