Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
The poor misunderstood bounce rate
Quite popular and highly valued bloggers keep sharing misinformation about bounce rate. According to them it means the time your audience members spend time on your site. Bounce rate has very little to do with the time and in most cases it has nothing to do with it. A person can spend half an hour on your site and still create a bounce. I have wrote about this subject before, and I guess I'll have to keep writing until people stop spreading the misinformation.
In reality bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter your website through one page and leave the site through that same page without visiting other pages. They can spend a long time on that page and still bounce from it. The bounce can happen due to many reasons. Blog posts or news articles are usually the type to have high bounce rates. This is because most people go and read one thing on the site and then pop off. Also external links on the page may (or may not) create a bounce. Even if the links on your site open to new window or tab there can still be a bounce if the person leaves your site in open in the other window/tab without interacting with it for a while (thus a new session is created after they return later). One page sites of course have high bounce rates because they don't have other pages for the visitors to visit. A web store is likely to have lower bounce rate than a professional directory or a blog, because of the way the audience behaves on these very different types of websites. It's good to remember that a high bounce rate may also mean the visitors have got what they needed. They came to look for an article about a subject and as they got satisfied reading it they left. Or they came to look for certain information on your site and they found it and left happily.
Unfortunately Google Analytics, which is a very popular website traffic and audience analytics tool, prominently features the average bounce rate on the default reporting. This has lead many who don't understand it to think it is a very important singular metric. Bounce rate alone doesn't tell much about your site or it's performance. The average bounce rate is misleading and you should take a deeper look in how different pages perform. For instance your blog posts are likely to have higher bounce rates than other pages on your site. I recommend reading more about this on my earlier post about why high bounce rate doesn't mean your site is in trouble.
I find demographics and interests much more valuable than bounce rates or even the amount of users. Of course any analytics is all about the full image rather than any one metric. That is why looking only at bounce rate or even only at interests can be distracting you from the main point. But if you are going to keep a close eye on the bounce rate at least make sure you know what it means.
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