What is Bounce Rate?

This is a forum topic for discussing the article "What is Bounce Rate?":

http://www.elated.com/articles/what-is-bounce-rate/

What is bounce rate, and why is it important? This article explains how bounce rates work, and looks at typical bounce rates for different types of site.

Thanks. This is one of the best articles on the topic I've read in recent times. Looking forward to the second part.

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http://www.mauconline.net

Thanks mauco. Should have the next article in the next week or so!

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Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

bounce rate is a measurement of site's usage..
if bounce rate is say suppose 100% then it is bad for site
if it tends to be closer to zero then it is good for site.

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PLAVEB Corporation
http://www.plaveb.com/
USA

Why is 100% bounce rate "bad"?

What if you runs a search site, or a lead generating site, or a MFA site?

For these sites a "bounce rate" of upto 100% is to be expected and is absolutely normal. I would expect Google's "bounce rate" is well over 90%.

Bounce rate is subjective and totally dependant of the type of site that it is being measured for this metric.

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Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/

@chrishirst: Great post. I agree with the point you've made about bounce rate being subjective and dependent on the site/page being measured.

I noticed this on a site that had a landing page that required visitors to sign up for a particular service. Though it had a high bounce rate, the page still fulfilled its purpose because once you landed on it, you had one of 2 choices either sign-up or leave. So for those that signed up, the page had fulfilled it purpose and the owners of the site were pleased.

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http://www.mauconline.net

Thanks for the helpful explanation.

We have a “personality” website we post to daily, mostly for fun and to keep our humor writing, cartooning, and photo skills in shape. Topics range across the spectrum of whatever we found interesting that day. Still, it’s interesting to see what topics and medium were most compelling. And no surprise, looking at bounce rate shows that topics that are part of a thematic thread or are completely unique to our site have the lowest bounce rate.

For instance, I crocheted a hat last week in honor of Alexandre Bilodeau’s Olympic gold medal for Canada and blogged on it, titling it “In Honor of Gold, I’m Making A Bobbled Bilodeau.” Three days later, we posted “Bobbled Bilodeau Update,” and guess what? A bounce rate of zero.

BTW, as an ex-teacher, I love that you add the "summary of what you've learned" section at the end.

Ciao, Kathy

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Kathy

Hi Kathy, welcome to Elated.

What you say is very true: Several linked pages that follow a consistent theme will often have a low bounce rate, since visitors will tend to read more than one page.

Bounce rates really can vary wildly from page to page, depending on the type of content, the way the page is linked to, and so on.

Thanks for your kind words regarding the summaries. I've started adding summaries to articles recently and I think it really does help the learning process!

Cheers,
Matt

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Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/