What's your bounce rate?

TechSoup Blog has a suggestion for a web metric you might want to consider: bounce rate. When properly measured with a web analytics tool, bounce rate can be a very effective way of assessing the quality of web traffic to your organization's Website. It can also be a helpful way to gage what is working and what isn't when it comes to the usability of your Website.

Have you used the bounce rate metric to assess the ROI of your organization's Website? Have you found it to be useful metric?

Best,

Megan

Megan, thanks for making this post -- it's quite timely as this is one of the metrics I discuss in an upcoming article I'm writing for TechSoup.

Like Avinash mentioned, Bounce Rate is one of the easiest metrics to measure, yet I think many organizations don't give it the attention it deserves. BR quickly tells you what pages on your site are converting or not, and if you're getting ROI on your PPC/marketing campaigns, etc.

Essentially, your bounce rate is your failure rate. It's always a good idea to record your site's baseline BR. Don't be afraid to experiment by making some simple changes to your site, then re-assess the bounce rates in the weeks and months that follow. Look to see if your BR has improved over this time. If so, this is a good indication that the changes you made to the site worked!

Yann

Thanks, that's an interesting article. (I also like the MarketingProf newsletter).

One thing I've read about bounce rate (and which I've taken to heart) is that many sites, even high profile 'successful' sites, have quite high bounce rates. It is less important to worry about the overall bounce rate than to see if you can improve it. I didn't see Avinash refute this.

I thought this article had very practical tips, which could be used to work more effectively with bounce rate.

Best wishes,

I am not sure if it is safe to use the term "failure rate" when it is affixed to the bounce rate.

Quite often I do a Google search for something... bring up the first match on my search string, and immediately realize that it is not what I am looking for. This is not because the site I landed upon "failed" me. It just did not happen to be what I was looking for.

From the site owner perspective, perhaps the surfer entered inappropriate key words for what they were truly searching for. The fact that my site did not "convert" for them is not necessarilly a poor reflection upon my site.

Good point, Tim. It seems like this should also be a factor to take into consideration when you're determining how to measure bounce rate--either based on those visitors who only view a single or spend a short time on the site.

--Megan

I'm glad to see the other views of "bounce rates". I can confirm that just about every site that I have ever seen has a considerable amount of traffic that hits the home page and then "leaves".

Part of this is due to search queries matching words that are either not in close proximity to each other, or just funny combinations. If the page title and description are not clear, then you can get traffic that is off-target and leaves right away.

Then there may also be traffic from all kinds of bots that only hit one page. These can be identified because they do not load any graphics that are on the page, only the page itself.

And finally if you ever watch what cookies are being requested (And why would you...?) in your browser you may notice that searche pages at Google often load a cookie for the top search result. This is an anticipation that you are going to be visiting that page and I think there is some caching that is going on behind the scenes.