Avinash Kaushik is at it again. The Web Analytics guru, blogger and now, Google Evangelist, recently wrote a fascinating article over on the Marketing Profs Daily Fix blog. In the article, entitled Bounce Rate: Sexiest Web Metric Ever? , Kaushik examines a fairly simple and uncomplicated measure: Bounce Rate, and shows us how it can be useful in a variety of ways to analyze web site traffic and to improve the conversion rate.
He defines bounce rate and highlights its importance, as follows:
In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave "instantly".
...
Bounce rate measures the quality of traffic you are acquiring, and if it is the right traffic then it helps you hone in on where/how your website is failing your website visitors.
For the time- and attention-challenged, here is a very quick summary of his main points for measuring bounce rate:
- Find the definition of Bounce Rate for your Web Analytics tool and measure it for your web site as a whole (as a baseline).
- Measure the bounce rate for your traffic sources.
- Measure the bounce rate of your PPC campaigns.
- Measure the bounce rate of your top-trafficked pages.
Interestingly, in one of the comments for the post, he highlights specifically how Google Analytics can be used to track this data.
Overall, Kaushik's article is a comprehensive look at the uses of this type of data. This is especially useful because Bounce Rate is a fairly simple metric that is offered by most WA tools, including Google Analytics (which is free!). If you are interested in Web Analytics, then I recommend checking out the original article at Marketing Profs and the abundant comments on the post.
Further Reading:
- Avinash Kaushik's blog: Occam's Razor [highly recommended]
- The Google Analytics Dashboard at Google Blogoscoped
- Choosing the right Web Stats and Traffic Analysis Program at Digital Inspiration
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