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[nates450r]

I just installed google analyitcs on one of my websites (been using other stats software)
i just wanted to know what a acceptable bounce rate is or what are your avg bounce rates?

my stats for about the first 10 hours
19 Visits
10 Unique Visitors
54 Pageviews
2.84 Pages/Visit
00:05:58 Avg. Time on Site
36.84% Bounce Rate
47.37% % New Visits

this site is making money and is faily optimized (so its successful)

 

[michellerana]

An acceptable bounce rate depends on your type of site. It is really determined by what your goal on a web page is.

Check your analytics to tell you what page your visitors bounce on. If a person's query is answered on the landing page, then a high bounce rate is fine. But if you want someone to buy something on another page within your site, then a high bounce rate is bad. Anything from 25% to 50% is quite acceptable. If the rate is over 50% then you might want to improve the relevance of your page, your site layout and content. If it's a money page (product review page/sales page) and your visitors click through to the merchant site then a bounce is a good thing.

 

[chris72]

I wouldn't worry so much about the bounce rate as the conversion rate. My best converting sites have a bounce rate between 45% and 92% :)

However I believe that if you have your site through Google analytics that they will have access to your bounce rate and this will affect how they rate your site. ie a high bounce rate would indicate to them that you site holds very little relevant content for those keywords whereas a low bounce rate would indicate that your site has information that is good enough to hold the attention of visitors.

Rach

 

[smuigal]

I just checked Netwoozy's stats and it has a 5.11% bounce rate, average pages read 3.8 and average time just about 2 minutes. I guess that's good, but I'd like to see people taking more time to read the articles.

What about you guys? How long is your average time spent reading. Not sure what the norm would be.

 

[esolutions]

That's huge Smuigal! (by huge I meant good)

Usually, the older/higher ranked a site gets, the more long tail traffic it gets, which can be good for bounce rate. At the same time however, you can get traffic from random searches as you rank for terms that are found loosely on your site, but aren't necessarily related to your core topic. Searchers that arrive on these terms will bounce very quickly and drive your rate up.

Using goals in Google analytics helps you to get a better gauge of what your visitors are actually doing on your site.

 

[dave333]

I always aim for under 40% bounce rate. Since the Panda update, bounce rate has a bigger influence on rankings than ever, so provide quality and don't just try to monetize clients, ENGAGE them and you should see your bounce rate reduce.

I also use photos and images and split paragraphs into small bite size pieces to ensure the readability is up to standard.

 

[burkhardt5]

Hello everyone.

I have a site that recently had an rise in bounce rate (from around 51% up to 66%). I havent done anything that should have made this happen.

I think that in some niches, having an add above the fold may scar off visitors. The site in question is in the world of warcraft niche http://superiorwowguide.com so most of my visitors are very knowledgeable about the game allready and might bounce off just because they see that I am promoting something for sale.

I think that I am going to drop the top of fold adds for a few weeks and see what happens but I wanted to get some feedback first.

Any thoughts?
Never Give Up!!!
Paul

 

[jimcoe]

I agree with Michelle that the bounce rate and time-on-page depend heavily on your Affiliate sales process design. Mostly on whether you want prospects to investigate your other pages as part of your sales process or whether you expect them to hop directly from your Landing/Sales page to the vendor's site - which is the definition of a "Bounce" (Visitors leaving your site from the same page they landed and started on).

And you can expect a blog to have a different Bounce Rate than a set of static web pages.

My best Bounce Rate:
For a typical "how-to" blog of mine http://www.well-made-webs.com/windows-wisdom "Windows Wisdom - Advice and Tips for Windows Users", where I expect people to look around through various pages, the best Bounce Rate I've had is about 25%, with Time-On-Page of 2-3 minutes. I also find that Bounce Rate bounces around a lot from day to day (with no changes on my part). So, I'd average out your Bounce Rate numbers over a month.

Also, a blog design makes Bounce Rate a bit ambiguous. Because of the dynamic Content Management System, prospects can read several topics (posts) on some of the pages they might land on, rather than traversing my pages to look at different topics.

As I get more links to the deep single posts, and post more, my bounce rate seems to improve.

Google and Bounce Rate?
As far as Google including Bounce Rate in your Search Engine ranking, I understand they do that - but I don't think they need you to use Google Analytics to know your Bounce Rate. Please correct me if I'm wrong on that.