I ran across Bounce Rate articles on the web recently and see that many people are wasting their time with this metric. A high bounce rate can be because:

• The referring website is low quality. This happens a lot with social media sites
• The search engine is sending traffic through its images feature
• The keyword is not that relevant to your product offering but your web site ranks high on the search engine
• The traffic is coming directly. This could be from bookmarks but also from hackers, employees or robots that you web analysis software is not filtering out
• Loyal visitors may only come to see what is new (especially from a newsletter) and then leave

A high bounce rate in these cases is not something to worry about.

Bounce rate is almost meaningless unless you drill down

Avinash has put forward good ideas but in most cases we need to go further. Drill down to the:

• Keyword. This is obvious
• Page. This is not enough. When looking at the page drill down to the keywords and traffic sources
• See how the bounce rate changes over time. Map this to previous years to eliminate seasonal influences. Then map changes in bounce rate to changes made on the page, traffic source and keyword changes. This will provide further insights. You may find a change you made to a web page that you forgot to track that either caused much damage or increased success rate dramatically
  
  
  Tracking bounce rate over time can reveal website changes that were overlooked and cause damage. Track by page and by segment for best results.
• Cost of wasted money from Google Adwords and other PPC campaigns. Multiply the bounce rate by the spend for each page but don’t stop there. Analyze by keyword and ad too

After your analysis you will find website pages and/or traffic sources to optimize. Don’t forget to track the improvements you made to make sure your changes bring the desired results.

Time on site is frequently used as a conversion proxy when conversions rates are too low to be statistically significant. Avianah Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor blog entry shows how to segment visitors to get meaningful actionable data.

Here is a table showing different keywords. It is clear that keyword 4 has the best time on site. All things being equal, this keyword seems to be the best.

Segmenting traffic by keyword show which one has the highest time on site.

Let’s go further. Lets take out the people who bounce and then segment. Now we can see that keyword 2 has the people with the highest time on site.

By filtering out bounce rates we can see which segment is most important

If we have a B2B lead generation web site with high value products that do not have a lot of sales this segment may be the most important and should be focused on. This is because the quality of the visitors is much more important than the quantity. Using your web analytics solution for drilling down