A bounce occurs when a web site visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.Bounces are one of the underappreciated, underunderstood, misunderstood Web metrics. Show me a person who says they understand bounce rate and I’ll show you a liar.
I understand them. They’re not very helpful in a vacuum though. If you slice the bounce rate by time spent on page and referrer, you can build a story about who (referrer vector) finds a particular page interesting (time spent vector) enough to check it out, interesting enough to check out more pages (bounce rate), or not interesting at all.
Like any complex entity, a single metric that has only a single unit (or is unitless) is a gross oversimplification of the entity. Like describing a Ferrari 430 Scuderia as a car with a top speed of 197 mi/h (which is even a compound unit). Exploring other metrics to build a store will yield the engine’s output specifications as: 360.4 kW (483 hp) at 8500 rpm and 465 N·m (343 lb·ft) of torque at 5250 rpm (source wikipedia, so it must be true)… a far more compelling story to someone who cares (I don’t).
Anyway… measuring is important. ”If it’s not measured it can’t be managed” was the mantra at AOL when I worked there, and I’ll repeat it over and over again to anyone who will listen.
