Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate in web analytics terminology is a metric that represents a percentage of single page visits. Bounce rate can be interpreted in many dimensions, such as bounce rate of an entire website, bounce rate of a specific page, bounce rate of visits that originated (referred) from a given search engine, etc.

Although it is generally accepted that the lower the bounce rate, the better, this may not be necessarily true for all types of websites. Websites that receive a lot of traffic from specialty search engines, such as local or news search, will experience a much higher bounce rate when compared to an e-commerce solution or a forum.

Also, from a perspective of a publisher, a visitor who clicks one of your advertisements right off the bat and is then redirected to an advertiser's destination page is in reality generating you revenue, even though the visit is technically considered a bounce.

There is no predetermined high versus low value for the bounce rate and is usually specific to a niche that your website is serving. It is more productive to match up bounce rates of individual pages of your website to determine successful strategies or compare bounce rates that you observe from various referrers. In other words it is a relative metric that can guide you towards creating better content and help you streamline your marketing efforts.