Hi, I have a question about the bounce rate in Google Analytics. Below are my stats for July. (The site is forum.scubish.com and www.scubish.com) 30,438 Visits 2.32 Pages/Visit 68.20% Bounce Rate 70,685 Pageviews 00:05:44 Avg. Time on Site 83.17% % New Visits Is this normal? I read that you should aim for a bounce rate well below 50%, so it seems that I have some issues with the site. However on the other hand the people that stay spend nearly 6 minutes which seems like a long time. Can someone shed some light on these numbers for me? Thanks, Matthias
I track all stats monthly in an excel sheet, and in the month of July the average time spent on the site (around 40,000 monthly uniques) went from around 2 minutes to over 6 minutes. Using analytics I went back through previous months and found that they also said 6 minutes. So until I hear something to the contrary I do not trust the latest time measurement. This might be unique to me though. I would guess that a fair amount of forum traffic comes from long tail searches which your content might not answer, or it might answer it too well so they leave straight away. This might explain your fairly high bounce rate. The average time on site is probably bumped up by hardcore users spending 1 hr+ on your forum.