Web Design & Development Guide

Bounce Rate

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Bounce Rate (also called % Exit) is a term used in website traffic analysis. A Bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a certain session timeout elapses. It is important to note that there is no standard minimum or maximum time limit a visitor must leave by in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software. A commonly used session timeout value is 30 minutes. In this case, if a visitor views a page and leaves his browser idle for 31 minutes, they will register as a "Bounce". If they then continue to navigate after this delay, a new session will occur and the last page they view before exiting or timing out again will result in another "Bounce". Thus, it is important to note the dependency between bounces and sessions.

The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of people who visit a page and leave within the specified timeout period, divided by the total number of people who have visited the page. In contrast, the Bounce Rate for a website is the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a website per session divided by the total number of website visitors.

Bounce rates can be used to help determine the effectiveness or performance of an entry page. An entry page with a low bounce rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the website. ^[1]

Avinash Kaushik, Google's Analytics Evangelist states, "it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying." ^[2]

It is also important to consider that bounce rates mean different things for different pages on a website. For example, if the page that you are investigating is the final step of a process (purchasing a product, registering for information) having a high bounce rate should not be unexpected. On the contrary, if the page that you are analyzing makes up the first step of the process (viewing a product), then a high bounce rate might be cause for concern.

Reference

1. ^ http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/text/38069.html.
2. ^ http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/05/excellent-analytics-tip-11-measure-effectiveness-of-your-web-pages.html

See also

• Web analytics

References

1. ^ http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/text/38069.html.
2. ^ http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/05/excellent-analytics-tip-11-measure-effectiveness-of-your-web-pages.html

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