If you are consulting your Google Analytics Dashboard, one of the top six metrics is the bounce rate. Yet out of all the metrics on this page, it certainly seems to be the most mysterious.
A real life example
Recently we setup the web-based Blackberry Usage Survey for one of our customers. The survey was uniquely advertised with a single blog post on one of the top Blackberry blogs, crackberry.com.
The first page of the crackberry site consist of 15 blog posts and is updated very often, thus the posts on this page usually are not older than 2 days.
At the conclusion of the survey we had some interesting statistics in the referring sites section to look at:
| Day #1: |
2436 vists |
87% of total |
| Day #2: |
677 vists |
83% of total |
| Day #3: |
199 vists |
74% of total |
| Day #4: |
59 vists |
43% of total |
| Day #5: |
34 vists |
29% of total |
| ... |
|
|
| Day #10: |
2 |
3% of total |
As you can see, as soon as the blog post about the survey was no longer on the first page of the crackberry site, referrals virtually ceased to come, or in other words, most users of the crackberry site read only the first page and left.
This example not only illustrates effectively the word "bounce" rate, but also the fact that it is questionable if a high bounce rate is a sign of a good or badly performing website.
Definition
Wikipedia defines the bounce rate like this:
[The bounce rate] essentially represents the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.
The formula used to calculate bounce rate is:
Bounce Rate = Single Page Access/ Entries
Is it bad or good?
On sites that I track with Google Analytics, the bounce rate varies between 10% and 75%
In other words, 10-75% of all users come and leave and don't do what you thought or logically expect they would: stay a long time, read many pages and complete certain actions.
Don't jump the gun here. Before judging the success of your site based on the bounce rate you have to look into two other metrics: the number landing pages and the number of returning visitors (visitor loyalty).
Giving your stats an overview from a different angle, you will find out that your home page is not your only landing page and in some cases it will not even be your top landing page. This is due to the fact, that more and more users are using search engines to find EXACTLY what they are looking for. Their use of more precise search phrases than in the past creates the side effect that not your home page, but some other page is ranking higher in the search result. In other words, your visitor might have found what he or she was looking for with one single page view.
Different strokes for different folks, when defining success
You probbaly can imagine that the in case of the crackberry site, the visitor loyalty metric might be more important than the bounce rate. If you have a high bounce rate, but a high percentage of your users are visiting you on a regular base, your website concept might just work fine.