actinic
online marketing blog
Monday, September 1, 2008
When Too Much Bounce Is A Bad Thing
For online businesses in general, and online marketing in particular, web analytics is one of the most important things to know about. Even a free analytics package such as Google Analytics can give you crucial information about the performance of your site and how to improve it - which can make a significant difference to the bottom line.
One of the most-used statistics that analytics provides is the 'bounce rate'. If you're not familiar with the jargon, a bounce is when a visitor arrives at a web site, views the page they land on, then leaves without clicking through to any other page. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who bounce.
A bounce can indicate many things, from a poorly designed web page to a mis-directed search, and every site will experience them. The question is, what bounce rate ought we to expect? Unless you know what's reasonable and what's unreasonable, it's hard to know what a bounce rate of x% actually means.
So I did some searching around and came across this very useful survey that produced some average bounce rates for different types of site:
http://webanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/03/typical-bounce-rates-survey-results.html
The writer doesn't indicate the sample size or how the survey was conducted, so I don't know how scientific it was. But it's definitely better than no information at all.
Our site has a bounce rate of around 47%, which is average for its type. Average is not really good enough for us, so there's still work to do. But knowing roughly where we stand helps me to set realistic targets, and to prioritise the work against other tasks that offer more (or less) promise for improvement.
# posted by Actinic @ 4:42 AM 
I think it is important to know your traffic, how it is finding you and which pages they have visited on your site, this helps you to improve your site and your bounce.
# posted by 
affiliate marketing : September 23, 2008 5:53 AM
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