Bounce rate – the most useful metric?
Web analytics tools can deliver a vast amount of information to you about your website and your business. Arguably one of the most useful metrics is the bounce rate. Bounce rate tells you about visitors who have literally ‘bounced’ away without visiting any other parts of your site.
A great way to measure the quality of traffic to your website, the bounce rate is easy to understand and communicate to the other parts of your business and can help identify the areas in which your site is failing your visitors.
In the following video Google’s Avinash Kaushik explains why he thinks the bounce rate metric is so useful:
If your marketing efforts are effective the amount of quality traffic to your website will increase, therefore fewer users will bounce away and the percentage will go down.
So the 20 million dollar question -- what constitutes a good bounce rate? Well, the lower the better. Remember you will never be able to reduce your bounce rate to zero but a good figure for a business website is around 30%. If you can achieve this, or even reduce it, you’ll find that your all important conversion rates will go up.
A note to bloggers: don’t panic! Blogs are different. Visitors are often attracted to your site by a single relevant post, they’ll enter your site at the post and may well navigate away again after they’ve read it or by clicking on a useful link that you’ve provided. This doesn’t mean you haven’t attracted quality traffic; it’s just the nature of blogging. There’s still a rule of thumb metric for you though. If you can achieve a bounce rate of 50% or less you’re doing well.
Forthcoming related posts will include more ideas for getting the most from your analytics tools. If you want to keep up why don’t you subscribe to our feed?
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