One of the most important statistics available to judge the effectiveness of your website is the often misunderstood bounce rate statistic. This stat shows the percentage of visitors that come to your site and then immediately leave without visiting any additional pages (or visitors that spend only a few seconds on your site).

The Bounce Rate is an indicator of the quality of the traffic you are acquiring and can help you zero in on areas where the content on your site may not be enticing enough to hold the interest of your target visitors.

Lower is Better

Just like in golf, you want the lowest score possible when managing your bounce rate. Your marketing efforts should bring you more visitors that are able to successfully complete the task they were looking to accomplish and fewer that decide that it would be easier to accomplish their task somewhere else.

A good place to start when investigating the overall health of your content is to analyze the following Bounce Rate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

• Bounciness of your Entire website
• Bounce rate of your Home page vs. the entire website
• Bounciest Landing Pages
• Bounciest Keyword Searches
• Traffic Sources with the highest number of bounces
• Bouncey Campaigns
• Bounces by Browser

Consider Bounces In-Context

Once you have gathered each of the these metrics, it's important to look at them, one-by-one, in context with the specifics of your website.

If your home page has a high bounce rate in comparison with other pages within your website, for example, it may not be cause for alarm if you know that multiple employees within your organization have set their browser home page to be your company's home page. If this is the case, you'll want to focus more on bounce rate statistics that exclude data collected from your home page or from traffic that originates from your office IP address so that the percentage is not unjustly skewed.

Evaluate Potential Causes

There are several actionable items that may be contributing to a high bounce rate:

• Your content doesn't match what the visitor is expecting
  
  If a landing page on your site is picked up in the search engines for apples and you only sell oranges, then visitors will move on to another site because the content doesn't match their browsing criteria.  If you find that this is the case, optimize your website for the search terms and phrases that are specific to the product or service you are promoting on your site.
  
  
• The audience coming from a referring site doesn't match your target consumer
  

  If you sell denture cream on your website, you may find that referring traffic from MySpace is contributing heavily to your bounce rate. This is obviously a very silly and extreme example, but after studying your own personal bounce rate, you may determine that it would be better to focus marketing efforts on very targeted groups of your desired customer base instead of mass marketing on trendy social networking sites.

• The first impression of your site misses the mark

  You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Ensure that your website renders properly in multiple browsers and that the formatting on your key landing pages matches the professional look-and-feel of the rest of your site.  Verify that your bounce rate numbers aren't heavily influenced by visitors viewing your site from one particular browser or operating system.

• Response time for your site could be improved

  If you are running on a slow server, visitors will not wait patiently while your site decides to load. Verify that the load time for the pages with the highest bounce rates is within an acceptable range, and take time to optimize the pages that load slowly in order to prevent premature clicking away from your quality content.

There is no hard-and-fast industry standard when it comes to bounce rate, but most healthy websites fall within a range of 18% - 30% for the overall bounce rate. While just about every page on your site has room for incremental improvements to lower this percentage, any page with a bounce rate of higher than 30% should be looked at very closely.

As our favorite web analytics maven, Avanish Kaushik aptly tweeted:

The only good bounce rate is one that is going down every month, even if by a little.

Synergy Stats tracks bounce rate information for your entire site, by specific landing page, and by traffic source over multiple time periods.

If you're interested in tracking bounce rates on your website, sign up for a free account today.