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A while back we wrote an email newsletter that talked about bounce rates. Due to the clamoring for more information, I have decided to expand this into a post.
First, what is a bounce rate? Depending on your analytics tool, bounce rates are defined slightly differently:
- Any visitor who stays on your site for less than a certain amount of time (usually 10 seconds).
- Any visitor who only looks at only one page on your site before leaving
While the definitions are slightly different, the end meaning is exactly the same: you got absolutely nothing out of those visitors. Zilch. They don’t even remember your company name or what your logo looked like.
So why does this matter? Well, bounce rates represent an incredible opportunity: it’s quite hard to get more traffic, and it’s generally pretty easy to get more out of the traffic that you already have. Bounce rates are also one of (if not the) best metrics for actually giving us insight into what our visitors think about our website. Page views, visits, unique visits, and time on site don’t tell us anything about WHY the users actually do anything. A high bounce rate indicates that your visitors are allergic to that page. You can take a look at it, come up with a hypothesis as to why it might be having troubles, and make a change (or better yet run a controlled experiment so that half of your visitors see the old version and the other half see the new version). Wait a month and see if things get better or worse, and now you have feedback on your hypothesis. If you were correct, you now are getting more results out of your website without having to pay for more traffic AND you know something about your visitors. This kind of data is hard to get, and invaluable to helping your visitors to have a great experience.
What do you all think about bounce rates? Let me know any interesting experiments that you have run using them or feedback you have about how to best use it.