Website Benchmarking Initiative Insights: Revisiting Bounce rate, visits, and time on site

The three charts above illustrate the averages, minimums, and maximums in our dataset for three commonly analyzed Google Analytics data: Bounce rate, number of visits, and average time on site. The data was collected from one month of data across 28 schools, and it is a revisit of the analysis performed last year. What's changed?

What we found

Bounce rate

A bounce rate between 40 and 50% still seems typical. Our aggregate bounce rates did go down a few percentiles. Although the average remained almost the same, both the smallest and largest bounce rates expanded, showing more variation in the industry.

• The average bounce rate for websites was 42%.
• The lowest bounce rate was 18%, which is lower than previously observed.
• The highest bounce rate was 64%, which is higher than previously observed.

Number of visitors

The average number of visitors per site was 24,050, a drop from last year's 28,000 figure.

Last year, we observed that about half (47%) of the websites saw less than 15,000 visits. This year shows a slight increase in the same trend with 53% of websites seeing less than 15,000 visits.

Time on Site

The average length of time each visitor stayed on a continuing education website was up slightly. The majority of websites averaged somewhere between 3.5 minutes and 4.5 minutes, which represents an aggregate upward shift throughout the industry.

What does this mean?

Take a moment to compare these data to those from last year. Overall, it seems that sites in continuing education saw fewer, higher quality visits on their websites. While the decrease in average monthly visits seems to be down, this could be a positive change, provided the changes in bounce rate and time on site appropriately compensate.

On a closer look, visits appear to be down about 15% compared to last year. At the same time, the bounce rates improved approximately 6%, which the time on site improved by almost 7%. This makes it hard to determine whether these aggregate changes for the entire industry are positive or negative. This could vary by continuing education department.

Go back and check your own profile. Is your site following the same trend? If so, do you think the change has been aggregately positive or negative? In either case, making an effort to bring visits back to their former levels while controlling for bounce rates and time on site could be a very effective strategy for improving revenue.