Your bounce rate is worse than you think

Kevin Day, April 20th, 2009

One standard metric for measuring the performance of a website is its bounce rate.  However, I’ve recently learned that what “bounce rate” typically measures isn’t what I thought it was.

What I really want bounce rate to tell me is the answer to this question:

What percent of first time visitors to the site leave immediately?

It wasn’t until I found Google Analytics’ advanced segmenting feature that I could actually answer that question.

In Google Analytics, you can filter your reports by New vs. Returning visitors.  The resulting report then shows all of the data separated by New and Returning visitors.

For my fantasy football website, I had assumed that my bounce rate was 13% because that’s what my reports said.

However, when it’s broken down by New and Returning traffic, my new traffic bounce rate is higher at almost 23%.

The large proportion of returning visitors was skewing my overall bounce rate.  It’s obvious now that I see it broken out, but I had previously assumed that all traffic bounced equally.  It clearly doesn’t.

If you haven’t segmented your traffic by New vs. Returning, you may be surprised to see the change in your bounce rate and other statistics.  It only takes 5 seconds to do in your Google Analytics, so try it now.

3 comments (tags: analytics)

3 Comments:

  • Thanks for the tip and explanation.

    - Abdel, April 21st, 2009, 12:44 am

  • So simple, so effective – thanks for the tip Kevin.

    - Sean McColgan, April 21st, 2009, 2:57 am

  • Interesting points, but of course both rates are extremely low so you must have some great content on your site – or better yet, great targeted content for your visitors. You have hit on a good point, but it goes much further.

    You can also segment traffic by other variables that will shed light on the bounce rate such as visitors coming from search engines (and specific terms), visitors coming from various referring sites, visitors landing on specific pages, etc. For example, you might get lucky and find yourself on the font page of Digg or receive tons of traffic from Twitter or Stumbleupon. Traffic from these sources will usually balloon your bounce rate.

    - Scot

    - Scot, April 21st, 2009, 4:54 pm

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