Bounce Rate

A bounce occurs when a web site visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur but in Google case it is 5-10 second. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.

A visitor can bounce by:

* Clicking on a link to a page on a different web site
* Closing an open window or tab
* Typing a new URL
* Clicking the “Back” button to leave the site
* Session timeout

This measure however needs to be interpreted relative to a websites objective. On an quick information page, where the sole aim may be to give a quick information like a date or phone number, then bounce rate may be miss leading due to the fact the customer got there answer and left the site in under ten second.

But if the bounce rate high it is a good indicator that what the link that lead the person to this page might be misleading or the page does not have the information that your customers believe that it should.

Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated:

“It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

But I have found it hard to get anything under 45% with 36% being my best ever for a site wide bounce rate.