Calculate Bounce Rate in Mixpanel Analytics
Learn how you can measure bounce rate in Mixpanel Analytics.
In today’s digital landscape, data-driven decision-making is paramount for businesses seeking to optimize their online presence. Mixpanel, a popular product analytics tool, empowers businesses to track and analyze user behavior, gain actionable insights, and enhance user engagement. One critical metric that can help understand the performance of a website and landing page performance is the “bounce rate”.
Unfortunately, unlike Google Analytics, Mixpanel doesn’t provide a bounce rate out of the box.
In this article, I will guide you through the process of calculating bounce rates using Mixpanel Analytics.
What is a Bounce Rate?
In the realm of web analytics, bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who land on a particular webpage and then leave the website without taking any further action or engaging with any other page on the site during their session.
In simpler terms, a “bounce” occurs when a user arrives on your website but decides to exit without interacting further. This interaction could be clicking on another page, filling out a form, making a purchase, or any other measurable action that signifies deeper engagement.
The bounce rate is expressed as a percentage and is calculated by dividing the number of single-page sessions (or single-interaction sessions) by the total number of entries or sessions on the website. For instance, if a page has 1,000 sessions, and 400 of those sessions result in bounces (users leaving after only viewing one page), the bounce rate for that page would be 40%.
A high bounce rate can indicate landing page content doesn’t entice users to interact with the website.
Understanding bounce rate is crucial in deciphering user engagement and can offer valuable insights into how to improve your website’s performance, optimize user experience, and enhance conversion rates.
In the following sections, we will explore how to calculate bounce rate specifically using Mixpanel Analytics and the actionable steps you can take based on the insights derived from it.
How to Calculate Bounce Rate in Mixpanel Analytics?
There are several ways to calculate the bounce rate in Mixpanel. I will go over them one by one so you can utilize them based on your own event settings.
In my opinion, the 2nd one is the better way to calculate the bounce rate. But they all get us similar results.
For demonstration purposes, I will use viewed upsell product event throughout the article to calculate the bounce rate in Mixpanel. However, you should create a custom event combining all possible events that the user can perform after landing on the website.
Note the list of events entered in the above image is just an example and you should select events based on your website tracking.
1 — Funnels
Bounce is calculated using two metrics. Page viewed event (the event that is triggered as soon as the user lands on the page) and the corresponding event that the user can perform after landing, say in our case Product Viewed.
We can simply use the “Pageview” and “View Product” event in a two-step funnel to get us the bounce rate.
The above funnel demonstrates only 7.9% of the landed users move forward after landing on the site page. Hence in order to calculate the bounce rate we can apply a 1-conversion rate to get us the bounce rate. So 1–0.0788 will be 92.12%.
This high bounce rate emphasizes the need to revamp the website content and user experience to make users stick to the website.
Note: I am using a viewed product event. You should use the event that the user performs after landing in your user flow.
Funnel uses unique for the calculation, you can also use sessions for the same purpose.
You can use Funnel trends to understand the bounce rate over time. Don’t forget to subtract by 1.
2 —User Cohorts
On the similar idea above, you can use cohorts to calculate the bounce rate in Mixpanel.
In the above image, we simply get users who performed the pageview event but then didn’t perform the view product event. This gives us the total bounced users.
Then we can utilize our cohort in insight report along with pageview event to get use the bounce rate using formulas.
3 — Flow Report
Another option is to use Mixpanel’s flow report. It can tell us how many users after viewing the page dropped and didn’t perform any other event.
You can perform analysis on any of them to further dig down into what is impacting the bounce rate.
For example, using the user cohort method you can break down by properties such as traffic source, device type, browser, and user demographics to see if any segment is resulting in a high bounce rate. Apply filters to see how new and old users are performing comparatively.
Doing so will help to improve the website's performance and in return more sales for the business.
Final Thoughts
Mixpanel analytics is a very powerful tool. It gives you a lot of power to do many of the analyses within Mixpanel to get the insights you need to drive growth.
The right events and properties will give you the insights you need to improve your product and marketing. If user actions are captured in the proper format in Mixpanel, it can do wonders for your product and marketing analytics.
The key to unlocking scalable analytics starts with an instrumenting tracking plan. I will strongly recommend starting the Mixpanel implementation with an analytics strategy. That is where you decide what needs to be tracked and where. Here is a good guide from Mixpanel on creating a tracking plan.
Efficient event tracking goes a long way toward growth. Strategizing what to track can get you tons of insights with minimal effort.
