By Sameer Khanwww.KeyWebMetrics.com
B
ounce rate is the coolest metrics in web analytics because it can give you a good understandingof the website performance. It shows how many people visited only one page on site. Here is theexact definition from Wikipedia – “Bounce rate represents the average percentage of initialvisitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pageswithin the same site.”There are different ways to calculate bounce rate. Some use the time spent on the site data andsome use the single page visit data. Let’s discuss all the techniques in detail.
Time on Site Methodology
– Let’s imagine a person is searching for holiday gifts and he/shetypes “holiday gifts ideas” on Google. Fortunately, your website shows up at the top position outof 928,000 search listings . The visitor immediately clicks your site listing and lands on thehome page. After few seconds on the site (less than 10) the visitor is not impressed with the sitelayout and shuts the browser window . This is considered as a bounce because the time spenton the site was too little to encourage clicks or engagement.In our example, the visit was a single page (home page) visit. However, there is a chance thatsomeone lands on the site and quickly clicks an internal link and then exits the site from that page. This will not be considered as a bounce using the single page visit methodology (comingup next). It is still considered as bounce using time on site method because the time spent on siteis less than 10 seconds (some use 5 seconds).Time on site is a good indicator of the site bounce rate but unfortunately most of the analyticalsolutions cannot spit out this data directly. You have to use the time on site report and calculatethe bounce rate manually.
Single page visits
– Just like the name suggests, single page visit bounce rate calculation is based on each single page site visit. It’s the percent of the time a visit is a single page visit. Thisis the least recommended of all methods. The reason single page visit is not considered asaccurate bounce rate is it does not count the second and the third visits to the site by the samevisitor.To understand why second and the third visit by same visitor is important in the bounce ratecalculation let me give an example– John, an imaginary web surfer, visits a page A on my siteand exits my site form the same page A. This visit is counted as a single page visit. Ideally, this isa bounce rate of 100% but the story does not end here. John decides he should give my siteanother chance (lucky me ;). He revisits the same day the same page A on my site but this timehe also visits pages B and C. Using the single page visit formula, John’s visit is still a bounce, but in reality it is not due to his second visit.Single page visit bounce can only be accurate when every visit on the site is a first visit.
Single page/Entry page
– This is one of the technique I recommend to calculate the bounce rateand it is also the most popular bounce rate calculation. This method incorporates the second or more visits data by the same visitor in the calculation and eliminates the single page visitdiscrepancy.
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