Considered in the context of your site objectives, is a high bounce rate always a bad thing? Not necessarily. If people are getting the information they need from your blog and then moving on (maybe even to another one of your sites) or if they are seeing what they need on your site and then going straight to your brick-and-mortar, there is nothing wrong with bouncing.

Also, even for a relatively straightforward metric like bounce rate (% of visits that included just one pageview), it can be important to consider implications of metrics definitions and their use by web analytics tools in order to make well-informed decisions.

Here’s a case in point that I encountered recently in a site’s Google Analytics ‘Top Content‘ report:



Clearly there is a problem here that requires urgent attention: high traffic pages with huge bounce rates! It’s important to keep in mind, though, that bounce rate is calculated only for visits that start with the page in question. Being the ‘Top Content’ report, the pageviews account for all views of that page, whether the first page in a visit or the 50th.

So the report is NOT saying that of the 2,215 views of the first page in the list, 2,076 (97.5%) of them resulted in bounces. It IS saying that of all the visits that started with this page, 97.5% of them went no further. This, then, begs the question: “well, how many visits started with this page?”

For the answer to this question, we turn to the ‘Top Landing Pages‘ report in Google Analytics (or equivalent in your tool of choice). And here we see a story that puts things in perspective:



Yeah, that first page in the list has a high bounce rate…but it is based on only 16 entrances compared to over 2,200 pageviews in total! (I know we’re mixing metrics here, but the story is valid.)

Depending on the purpose and value of that page, this still may be cause for concern. But chances are there are bigger fish to fry.

There are other ways that bounce rate – and indeed most web metrics – can be twisted by context, so it is prudent to keep in mind the nuances behind the data being presented by our trusty tools.

(If you’re interested, there is further discussion of the ins-and-outs of bounce rates in Google Analytics here on the Google Analytics Help Forum – particularly relevant if you are wondering how to reconcile content and navigation reports.)


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