Know your web metrics – Bounce Rate
Recently, we’re looking at Google Analytics and we found that the bounce rate for one of our important pages had crept up to 50%. 🙁
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from that page) – the stat helps to determine the quality of the page.
Initially, we were a little perplexed and even arrogant when we were trying to figure out why people were exiting immediately. We started asking ourselves some questions…
- Whats wrong with page?
- Why aren’t the user getting it?
- Does the page match what the users expected to see?
- What information do the users expect to see?
Then we started to look at which pages the users were coming from, then it became clear that we’d mucked up the task flow of this particular action. We made some changes to the our task flow and the result were immediate and dramatic.
We had a 5 times improvement across those pages on the site it dropped from over 50% to 9% . And we’ve noticed 100% improvement in time on site as a result.
I can recommend that some analysis of your key metrics, can help you analyse whats working and whats not working on your site.
April 20th, 2008 at 6:45 am
John: It’s great to see how measuring your bounce rate has improved your site. Too often, people don’t track this important metric. I’ve been blogging about measuring the bounce rate in part of a Web Merchandising 101 series. You might find it of interest. ( http://spellman.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/04/how-high-can-yo.html )
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:23 am
For bounce rate metrics you can try http://www.pagealizer.com/
Pagealizer helps site owners get insight on how powerful their site content is. Pagealizer shows you in great detail how long people stay on your page (effective bounce rate), how far they scrolled down the page and where they clicked. check us out 🙂