When I introduce someone to Web Analytics for the first time, they generally go through several “light bulb” moments. They usually include things like:
- That’s how many users I get?!? (either with glee or frustration)
- So that’s where I get people from.
This will often lead to questions they didn’t know they could ask such as:
- Why don’t I get more sales?
- Why are people leaving the site?
- What is this bounce rate?
Why don’t I get more sales – a whole other article could be written on this, so we’ll leave it alone for now. But lets look at why people wil leave your site?
Legitimate reasons users leave your site
Every user will eventually leave your site. This is normal, so don’t worry about it – unless they are leaving before they should be doing what you want. Here are some good reasons for people to leave your site:
- They clicked on an ad you had on your site (you make money)
- They finished checking out from their purchase (you made money)
- They just contacted you (so you might make money)
What is a bounce rate?
Many terms are quite understandable when named (Time on Site, Page Views, Unique Visitors, etc.). Bounce Rate is one of those odd terms that most people don’t readily understand. It is measured as a percentage out of your total number of visitors.
A bounce is when someone visits only one page, and then leaves your site without visiting any other pages, or even refreshing your page (in the case of a news site where content is updated often).
Why is bounce rate bad?
Without seeing much content (only one page) it makes it difficult to make a sale, get a contact, or whatever you want your business to do.
What’s worse is that it potentially eats up a lot of resources. How you ask? Generally each page in a website should share numerous resources with other pages in your website. This would include things like background images, navigation images, CSS, and JavaScript files, etc. When you download a first page, you will download all of these resources from the site. However, once they are downloaded, the second file is much faster to download since all of the resources shared between the two are already taken care of. This means only the page, and any page specific resources should need to be downloaded.
However, if you send all of the files to someone who is only going to view a single page, you are not able to send them to someone else, thus slowing down your web site.
So how do we work on reducing your bounce rate? That will be covered in the next article.
About Walter Wimberly
I like the idea, cool!