The Website Meaning
A visitor arrives from a search, looks, and leaves. Counted across a month, the share of visits that end that way is the bounce rate. It is not a score of how good the page is. A page that answers a question completely can have a high bounce rate because the visitor got what they came for. A page that loads slowly on a phone has a high bounce rate because the visitor never saw it.
The number is only useful next to the reason. For a local business the common reasons are, in order: the page took more than three seconds to appear on a phone, the page was not what the search promised, and the thing the visitor wanted, usually the phone number or the hours, was not near the top.
The Email Meaning
A bounced email is one the receiving server refused or could not deliver. A hard bounce means the address does not exist. A soft bounce means a temporary problem, a full mailbox or a server that was busy. A business that sends from a free email address, or from a domain with no email authentication, sees more of both, because receiving servers trust it less.
How To Check It
Website bounce rate is in the site's analytics; on a BizPinPro site it is in the monthly Digital Pulse Report next to the page speed numbers that usually explain it. Email bounces show up in the sending server's log and, on a Mail-in-a-Box setup, in the return messages the sender gets.
The Foundation Connection
A high website bounce rate is a symptom listed in the Digital Foundation entry itself: the site is too slow on a mobile device. It is a Performance Metrics failure, and the fix is page weight, not a redesign.
