Measuring Success: What’s a Bounce Rate and Does it Matter?

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.