Bounce Rate – An Intuitive Web Metric

One of the important metric for your website landing pages is Bounce Rate which determines what sort of activity a user was involved after visiting the target page. To be precise, did the visit lead to additional visits on different pages of the website etc…?
Let’s take a look at this interesting video featuring a Google executive sharing some important facts about this powerful metric - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppgfjo6IIf4
What I liked about this Presentation is the analogy being used: They came, they puked and they left. Objective is to improve the bounce rates or in other words, reduce the percentage of bouncing users who leave the site without visiting any other page
A web analytic tool can measure this and one could always correlate theBounce Rates with AverageTime Spent on the Page and Exit Rates. If the average time spent on the page is reasonably good but the bounce rates are high, you need to improve your landing page design or navigation aspects in order to have a compelling user navigation experience leading to a $Conversion$ ora different page visit. If time spent on page is low along with high % of bounce rates, it is an obvious problem and the time has come to look at the fundamental problem with the landing page in question by updating the content as well as the overallsite designnot limited to landing pages.There could be exceptions however with Blogs which may be the only area of interest to the user who follows a specific link and may consequently leave the landing page after digesting the content. Sites like Stumbleupon may also artificially spike up the bounce rates. A word of caution: Average Time Spent on a page can sometimes mislead as this is where a user could have kept the page open doing nothing
The exit rates and bounce rates should not be confused as the bounce rate is computed per landing page in question while exit rate seems so synonymous with bounce rate, but the reality is that they are independent in that a user could have visited other pages prior to exiting the site from the landing page in question.
To conclude, these useful metrics can help you proactively monitor your site and improve conversion rates!