Bounce Rate (also called % Exit) is a term used in website traffic analysis. A Bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a certain session timeout elapses. It is important to note that there is no standard minimum or maximum time limit a visitor must leave by in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software. A commonly used session timeout value is 30 minutes. In this case, if a visitor views a page and leaves his browser idle for 31 minutes, they will register as a "Bounce". If they then continue to navigate after this delay, a new session will occur and the last page they view before exiting or timing out again will result in another "Bounce". Thus, it is important to note the dependency between bounces and sessions. -wiki
Bounce rate is percent of visitors that visits only a page from your site. They come on landing page and leave the site without browsing any other pages.
When a visitor leaves your site right from the landing page, its a bounced visitor, and you can define rate yourself
High bounce rate means the site must be horrible to site visitors and most likely they would never return again. They are not even interested to check other content of the site. First impression counts.
happens when a visitor immediately leave your page. You can read the instruction on Google Analytics. The implication is that maybe that page is targeting a irrelevant keyword or the there is something inherently wrong with your page design/layout/description
there are no guidelines and every site is different.....A visitor could come in, find what they want immediately and then leave and your analytics program could define that as a bounce...sites that use heavy ajax will also see a high bounce rate because there are not many page loads because only portions of the page is update.
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors.
Guys, this thread is 1 year old I have grown a lot now... I know a lot more than what I knew 1 yr back. First I thought "WHO IS THIS STUPID GUY WHO DOES NOT EVEN KNOW ABOUT BOUNCE RATE" And to my embarrassment it was me, one year back LOL! Thanks anyway!
Google is using several hidden techniques when it comes to granting top page 1 rankings. One of these techniques is by calculating bounce rates. I have written useful article on Bounce rate. I hope u will like it Please lemme know ur thoughts if u find my article helpful. http://www.seohawk.com/blog/google-bounce-rate-and-seo-rankings/
What would be a normal bounce rate for an e-commerce website? I've noticed that e-commerce websites are becoming more harder to rank well, at least in Brazil, loosing rankings towards if compared to non commercial ones. One of my websites has 68% of bounce, while other has only 15%. I really have no idea of the reason.
Bounce rates should be carefully used as a quality metric of site, since "a person leaving the site from the landing page" could mean a lot of things - for eg: a) he found what he was looking for and needs not to look any further; b) he dint find anything, got frustrated and left; c) the site dint prompt him enough to look further.
There's really no set rule to say what level of bounce rate is ideal, because it depends on the type of the site you have. If you have a full-blown content website like a blog then you'd want it to be low. But if you have something like a squeeze page then it doesn't really matter too much.
Want to low bound rate just design structure of website. Example : Use pics, a bit text, and list category on home page.