Last week I wrote about how I highly recommend using Google Analytics. Part of the reason I like Google Analytics is the various types of reports you can get. Some of them are pretty standard and self explanatory, but some of them can be a little puzzling. One of those puzzling ones is the bounce rate.
The bounce rate is the percentage of users that land on a page (any page) and leave the website before going to any other pages. Each page has its only bounce rate and when you add all the pages bounce rates together you have bounce rate of the website.
Depending on your websites goals and design, a higher bounce rate may be a good or acceptable statistic. For example, on some websites a common thing users are looking for is simply your phone number. If your website lists your phone number on every page, the user would not need to go to another page and the goal for the website (proving the phone number) is still accomplished.
A high bounce rate could also be a concern for some websites. There are a couple of factors that can lead to an unnecessarily high bounce rate. If your website has any video or audio that begins playing when a page loads (something I never recommend) you will tend to see a higher bounce rate due to people leaving the page right away because of the noise. Same if there are any flashy or annoying advertisements on the page as flashing or blinking advertisements tend to cause people to leave a website quickly.
If you are looking at your websites bounce rate and are not sure if it is a good or bad rate, let us know and we can take a look at the website and your goals. Once we know your website goals and the actions people are taking, we can make recommendations to improve the website and help to accomplish the websites goals.