When it comes to website analytics, bounce rate is as dead sexy as it gets when it comes to statistics.
Learn To Love The Bounce Rate
Site performance from a marketing standpoint can be understood better by webmasters who get the concept of the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits a site receives.
Google’s Alden DeSoto wrote on the Google Analytics blog how the bounce rate can help figure out troubles with a site’s conversion performance:
If your Bounce Rates are also low, your troubles are likely due to site design and usability issues. In this case, you might focus your efforts on streamlining your conversion funnel or making your site easier to navigate.
But if your Bounce Rates are high, you can focus your efforts on redesigning entrance (landing pages), improving the quality of traffic to your site, and doing a better job of pairing landing pages with ads.
Another Googler, Avinash Kaushik, suggested bounce rate could be the sexiest web metric ever. Some analytics tools may base bounce rate on single page visitors, while others deem a bounce occurs within a short, maybe five-second, time span.
With that in mind, one can judge the quality of traffic sent by referring sources. More importantly, one should look at the bounce rate for advertising campaigns:
In my humble experience this is one piece of analysis most agencies and companies overlook. Sure we measure conversion and roi and revenue, but are you measuring bounce rate for your PPC campaigns? Remember you can only convert if people are staying for more than five seconds on your website!
Poor performing ads may indicate the site publisher should stop bidding on those keywords, and review the landing pages and other campaign attributes associated with them.
Kaushik said it is difficult to get a bounce rate under 20 percent. “Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying,” he wrote.
