Google Analytics bounce rate |
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The Google analytics bounce rate definition is important to know. I was recently discussing this topic with colleague of mine and we both had the definition wrong. I am not sure if it changed, or we simply made it up, but we had both remembered bounce rate being the percentage of visitors that leave the site within a short amount of time. We went to look up the specified time for bounce rate in the Google Analytics docs and learned that there was none. Bounce rate, as defined by Google Analytics, is simply the percentage of visitors that view the landing page and leave:
Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy
One of our clients is a popular blog which contains a massive amount of content on what is almost always the most popular landing page, the home page. When a reader stops by, catches up on the latest posts by scrolling, and reading, and scrolling, and let's imagine he spends an hour reading and scrolling before he clicks off on a link in a post. He just bounced... according to Google Analytics.
If you are like me and look at bounce rate to better understand stickiness of content, or accuracy of an ad, be sure take note of the amount of fresh content on the landing page. A more accurate label for bounce rate in Google Analytics would be "People who view a page and leave". That's very different from "People who leave site within seconds due lack of engaging or irrelevant content", which is more along the lines of what I thought was the definition.
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