I think I’ve mentioned before how I have switched from Sitemeter to Google Analytics to monitor the statistics of my sites. Now that I have, I have a really great picture of what is working and what isn’t working on my different sites. One thing I love to monitor but didn’t understand at first was my Google Analytics bounce rate. That’s why I thought I’d explain it today…
A bounce can be defined as one single-page visit. So every time a person visits the home page of your site and then leaves — is considered a bounce. If your bounce rate is high, then lots of people are leaving your home page, but this could be based on a variety of factors.
1. You’re monitoring a squeeze page. A squeeze page is naturally going to have a high bounce rate because all they are there to do is visit and input their email and name. All squeeze page visits are going to have high bounce rates, which is fine.
2. A page on your site has been bookmarked. If someone has bookmarked a page on your site and visits only that page, then that is also considered a “bounce”. That’s fine too; at least they saved the page:-)
3. If your site is a blog, it may have a high bounce rate because most of your site’s content can be accessed by the home page. This of course depends on the type of blog template you use etc. I have one featured article on this site and then the rest are “teasers” that people will have to click on to read the rest. This helps to improve my bounce rate because readers are clicking onto another page when they click on the teaser links.
4. Poor site design could be why people are dropping by and then leaving. Readers will exit fast if your site’s homepage and navigation is cluttered or too complicated to understand. Think about creating a clean design and only a few navigational links when you are designing your site/blog. I like to use the Thesis theme for my article blogs.
5. Finally, it’s possible that you have installed your tracking code incorrectly and the tool is only tracking the homepage and not your other pages etc. If you are using Google Analytics, you can use this free site scan tool to check and see that it is installed on all of your site’s pages correctly.
Related Websites
- Postmark: Email Delivery in the Cloud | Rackspace Cloud Computing & Hosting
- Sitemeter Blogger
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[…] explained how to understand your bounce rate statistics in a previous article, but to describe it in its simplest terms – your bounce rate is the […]