Bounce Rate Can Be Misinterpreted

If you are as dedicated to web analytics as most online retailers, you keep a close eye on your bounce rate.

Bounce rate is a measure of the number of visitors to your site who leave the website directly from the page they enter without clicking through to any other page of the website. Bounce rate is calculated by the number of visitors who bounce by the total number of visitors to the site over the same period.

Do not confuse bounce rate with a page's percent exit rate. The exit rate represents the percentage of people who exit the site from any particular page. They may have already viewed many other pages on your site and simply choose to leave when they get to a specific page. The page that confirms a purchase order will have a high percentage exit rate.

Visitors bounce from a site for a variety of reasons. For example, if the keywords that visitors are using to find your site do not match up well with the site content, you probably could not retain that traffic.

This scenario sometimes occurs with a black hat technique that adds very popular keywords onto pages that they are not relevant to, in order to drive traffic then hope to entice visitors to stay. But, if you attracted someone because you managed to fit the words Angelina Jolie together with waterproof tents and camp stoves, the Jolie fans probably could not stick around long.

Pay per click ads can also be a problem if they are not closely aligned with the page content, causing visitors to leave again quickly.

Visitors may arrive at your site for the right reason, but if they find that the page is too difficult to read, or the right information is not readily available, they will leave and go onto the next page ranking in their results list. The same is true if the landing page is useful but there is not a clear navigation step to the next page. Websites that require visitors to download special software in order to make use of their information may fall into this category of 'just not worth the time' bouncers.

While most web analytics experts would say that you want to aim for the lowest possible bounce rate, there are some web experts that suggest you look a little more closely to solve the problem of a high bounce rate. For example, it is quite possible that your page with a high bounce rate is actually meant to be both an entrance and exit page. Because searchers are now looking for exactly the information they need, your high bounce page may have worked perfectly for them and they left completely satisfied.

You should also look at the return rate in conjunction with the bounce rate. If you have high visitor loyalty, then the bounce rate may be inconsequential to you. Your visitors come to your site, get what they need and leave. As long as you are getting whatever value you need from those visits, you can probably ignore bounce rates.