Bounce Rate is a metric used in web analytics packages, essentially it lets you know how a person has interacted with the page, if they’ve bounced that means they’ve not liked what they’ve seen and left the page.
How is bounce rate measured?
In Google Analytics Bounce Rate is represented by the percentage of visitors that leave a page without clicking through to another page on that domain.
Other web analytics packages are much more flexible, they give you the option to set the bounce rate on a number of factors.
Length of time spent on a page is sometimes used to measure the bounce rate of a page and if someone has stayed on a page for a set amount of time, say 1 minute, that visit may not be included as a bounce.
Bounce rate may also be calculated within a range of the average amount of time spent on a page (excluding outliers).
When is bounce rate not an appropriate metric?
When designing and developing websites we often try to give people as much information as they need on the page – I have the general mantra “Put as few obstacles in the visitors way as possible”, that can lead to a high bounce rate that indicates the web page is performing effectively.
Many hotel websites for example use third party booking software that takes the user off page resulting in a highly converting page with a high bounce rate.
Is bounce rate a useful metric?
Sitewide or Average Site Bounce Rate is a good indication, however you shouldn’t put too much weight on them, especially if you are adding content to the site on a daily basis as you won’t be comparing like for like.
As with all web analytics metrics bounce rate is an important tool in the Internet marketers’ arsenal, however it has to be used in conjunction with other web analytics metrics as well as with a liberal amount of consideration for what’s happening on page.