Was reading an interesting post by Seth Godin this morning about bounce rate called Silly Traffic. Google Analytics defines "bounce rate" as "the percentage of single-page visits". Which got me thinking -- what's our bounce rate?

The last time I calculated our bounce rate (before we installed GA), it was pretty good: about 50% of new traffic signed up for Weebly.

Traffic to Weebly.com is made up of about 40% new, 60% returning. Of the new traffic, a significant portion -- a little below 40% -- arrives from search engines.

I was quite surprised to log-in this morning and find out that our bounce rate is 33% for new visitors, and 20% for returning visitors.

On the face of it, this seems to contradict the beginning of Seth's article, that all sites see at least a 75% bounce rate from unfocused traffic, but I haven't had much time to think about why that might be.

What's your bounce rate?

 


Comments

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:11:32

Our bounce rate to http://www.ok-cool.com/ is currently about 80% for our blog. I attribute this to the fact that our blog is, well, a bit random sometimes with regards to content. Also, we get a lot of traffic from SumbleUpon which potentially lends itself to delivering high bounce rates (because I'm likely just to click Stumble again).

 

Steve

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:38:26

I run a site with about 8M pageviews/mo. My bounce rate is 66% this past 20 days.

I'm working on redesiging now to counter ad-rage & actual navigation.

 

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:46:54

We had a bounce rate of around 50% for http://www.learnsqlserver.com/ a while. I then refocused a few landing pages and bounce rate went to 43%.

 

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:25:03

My blog bounce rate (Google Analytics) is around 85%. Lots of traffic is from DZone.

Peace
-stephan

 

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:19:16

two sites I can account for:

MyGuestmap (mapservices.org/myguestmap) - 69% bounce rate
investidorvirtual.com - 17,55% (don't ask me how!)

 

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:50:13

72.42% bounce rate

6.33% Direct Traffic
90.05% Referring Sites
3.62% Search Engines
79.33% New Visits

most people come from mp3 blog-crawl sites like hype machine and elbows. I just signed up for xchannel and i've been getting a butt-load from them.

 

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:54:11

I was pleased to see that www.alastairhumphreys.com had a bounce rate of 80%. I was pleased that I had such a high number until I went away and learnt that actually a LOW number is what I want! Hey ho...
Al

 

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:00:14

The bounce rate for my eco yoga mat e-commerce site is consistently around 35%. That number skyrocketed to 90% in one day of experimenting with one "questionable" AdWords buy. ;)

 

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:25:56

My bounce rate came down from 85% to 55%. What is a fair bounce rate, since I underatnd that anything above 30%, is still too high?

 



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    David Rusenko is a founder at Weebly, a company that makes a web creation tool that doesn't suck. He's also a part-time DJ and traveling enthusiast.

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