If you’re a casual Google Analytics user, you may have noticed a mysterious statistic in your reports; the bounce rate. A lot of unmaintained, unintentional online management of your reputation can result in high bounce rates, in the neighborhood of 40-60% or (gulp!) higher.
Is that bad?
YES!
A high bounce rate means that a visitor came to your site, didn’t find what they were seeking and immediately “bounced” away. From the good people of Google:
“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.”
If you have a new site, or a blog on which you have not yet published enough relevant content, your bounce rate might be high. It is worth taking a look at the percentage regularly and working on reducing it over time.
I’m pretty happy that I’ve gotten my bounce rate down under 6% and suspect that’s about as good as it’s going to get. 
Marijean, great post about bounce rate and congratulations on getting yours so low.
It’s so funny that you chose this topic today because I sat down and started writing a post about bounce rate yesterday, although from a different perspective. I guess it is on many people’s minds lately.
@NickGilham Great minds – right? 🙂 It seems like a stat we rarely discuss but it comes up now and again from clients who don’t really understand what that number represents.
@NickGilham Great minds – right? 🙂 It seems like a stat we rarely discuss but it comes up now and again from clients who don’t really understand what that number represents.
@NickGilham Great minds – right? 🙂 It seems like a stat we rarely discuss but it comes up now and again from clients who don’t really understand what that number represents.