My friend pinged me today and asked me what bounce rate was. I told him that it ment the number of times the user bounces up and down on a ball…LOL. Bounce Rate is a term used in web site traffic analysis. It 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. Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors.
How do Visitors Bounce
- Clicking on a link to a page on a different web site
- Closing an open window or tab
- Typing a new URL
- Clicking the "Back" button to leave the site
- Session timeout
- A commonly used session timeout value is 30 minutes. In this case, if a visitor views a page, doesn't look at another page, and leaves his browser idle for longer than 30 minutes, they will register as a bounce. If the visitor continues to navigate after this delay, a new session will occur.
- The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page. In contrast, the Bounce Rate for a web site is the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a web site per session divided by the total number of web site visits.
Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik:
"It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”
Since I use Google analytics I went in to check out my own bounce rate on my blog. I found it to be 65%. According to Avanisah I should be worried. But lets be honest. Most of the hits on my site are coming from search engines so people get the information that they need and then “bounce” . This doesn't really concern me on my blog site that much as these users are in it for the short hall. Where this does come into play is on ecommerce sites where you want the user to stay engaged and by things as well as cruise around the site to buy more things. Also if your buying keywords it really gives you a idea of what is working for your site and what's not why your not converting.
Improving Your Bounce Rate and Getting More Page Views
ach website has different goals or requirements so I’ll not delve too much into details but talk about overall strategies. First of all, the bounce rate is very much influenced by what is visible to the visitor. They are much more likely to click to another page when they are presented with very relevant links, call-to-actions or information.
For publishers, the BBC content model shows how pages can be well integrated into a cohesive unit, thus encouraging users to bounce from the entry page to another. From the examples, you’ll see that content producers can include many additional links:
- Links to feature articles with in-depth analysis
- Links to other news articles on the same topic
- Links to a dedicated reference page dealing with only the specific topic
- Links to a comment section/forum to invite participation by readers
- Links to a Back story or general background information
- Links to a multi-media presentation (audio/video)
Hope that helps.