Stacey Barr is a specialist in performance measurement, helping micro and small business owners to move their business results from where they are, to where they want them to be, using powerful, transformational measures. To grab your free copy of Stacey’s Special Report “7 Clues to Measure What Matters In Micro & Small Business”, visit www.staceybarr.com/smallbusiness.
This is an excerpt from Measures That Matter For Websites: How To Track Your Website's Value Without Tracking Hits
One of the hippest website metrics is Bounce Rate, and with good reason. It measures the percentage of website visits that exited your website on the page they entered on.
It's a measure that shows you how often your website fails to engage visitors enough such that they want to look around. They land on whatever page of your site they've found, take a quick look and see it's not what they're after, and they promptly leave.
A high bounce rate means you're attracting people that aren't in your target market, or - and this is important - they are your target market but the webpage they're landing on is failing to engage them!
Bounce Rate is one of my favourite website measures for this very reason: it's a great indicator of how well your website grabs the attention of your target market.
You want it to be as low as possible, some say a bounce rate of 50% is reasonable and others say it's cause for concern. There are no hard and fast benchmarks, but the point is to keep testing and tuning to get your bounce rate to continually reduce.
And beware too, that the average bounce rate for your entire website may not be all that useful to track.
For example, on my own website I have some special webpages that I only send people to via my email newsletter, such as information about a workshop or product. And the bounce rate on those pages is very high - often between 80% and 100%. That's because people either check it out and decide it's not for them, or they buy it.
The purpose of sending them there was not to get them to surf around my website. Those pages are designed without links to any other part of my website, because I want them to focus just on the offer on that page.
So it's pages like my home page and general articles pages which I want to have low bounce rates for, because they attract new visitors rather than the leads I already have. And generally these pages do have lower bounce rates, usually around 15% to 30%.
The great news about Bounce Rate is that it's automatically measured for you by myriad website tracking applications. My personal favourite is Google Analytics, which is completely free and requires you set up an account and put some tracking code in each page of your website that you wish to track. Easy, and very powerful.
TAKE ACTION:
Find out if your website tracking application measures bounce rate, for your whole site and for each webpage in your site. If not, take a look at Google Analytics and start analysing which parts of your website are engaging people and which aren't.
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