hi, The bounce rate of my portal is very high. Need some help in understanding the below. My portal has many channels which is structured as subfolders and sub domains. Linked to other sites also. The bounce rate of the homepage is very high. Please help me understand how bounce rate is calculated in Google Analytics. Rgs Karthik
Bounce ratio is calculated as it is the ration of visitors who exited website (single page) with doing any interaction on site like clicking on link or watching video. hope it will help you to understand.
Bounce rate is both time based (time spend on site) - this can be from either clicking on a link (bouncing to another site) or just exiting out of the site. depending on the relevancy of your keywords to that of your site determines how long visitors stay on your site, which-in-turn lowers your bounce rate. But as I've already stated high bounce rates aren't always bad because they also mean that your customers are clicking through to your offers or other links present on your site. So overall, bounce rate is nothing unless you own a blog without any affiliate link/etc. In your case don't pay attention to that but make sure that every keyword you're ranked for (that HAS to do with your site) is catered to within your site. hope that makes sense.
If you follow Avinash Kaushik, he describes it as someone comes to your site, pukes and leaves Bounce rate is my favorite marketing metric. I actually made a Squidoo Lens on Bounce rate http://www (dot)squidoo (dot)com/BounceRate.
If a user visits your site, gets all the information they want, then leaves without clicking on anything, then that gets recorded as a bounce. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Do you have a lot of content on a single home page? Because that might be causing a high bounce rate - that happens with a lot of blog sites.
Maybe the visitors found no interesting on your homepage. It's possible that you are targeting the wrong keyword for your site.
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visit in which the person left your site from the landing page. You might as well change the keyword you used