What to ask your agency about bounce rate

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on bounce rate, these questions are worth asking early.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

A high bounce rate is not automatically bad. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Engagement time is usually the better signal. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

How to tell if yours is fine

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Three things worth confirming about bounce rate before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A high bounce rate is not automatically bad — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.