Bounce Rate. What does it mean to you?

Bounce rate means different things to different sites.

[Demaestro]

I was reading about some people who were concerned about their bounce rate getting higher. They were talking about all the good SEO things they had done but their bounce rate was going up.

This got me thinking about my bounce rates. I have some information sites. I have some E-Commerce sites.

Wouldn't it be true that if an information site was properly designed and structured and was very SE friendly wouldn't a high bounce indicate success? Someone is looking for something, searched, found your page in the SERP and left because they got the information they were looking for.

Now I would hate to see high bounce rates on my E-Commerce sites, but if those E-Commerce sites have physical brick and mortar stores also and your top page visited is the contact page then wouldn't a high bounce rate from that page again indicate they found what they are looking for?

All of a sudden I am unsure of how to look at this number.

I am curious to know how most of you interpret your bounce rates.

[zuko105]

For a lot of my sites (day job professional and personal projects) I always put offline contact information on every page to make sure that every page is a potential landing page that could convert.

Bounce rate for me is not necessarily an accurate "engagement" measurement as my end customers (and employers) will still get a "conversion" and "engage the user" by getting that phone call.

[MichelleStute]

So what would you consider to be a high bounce rate for an info site? For an e-commerce site?

[Deepak Panchal]

Bounce rate is defined as user came on your website and do not stay on your website for long time.Bounce rate can be reduced by several ways. Some of them are following:

1. Design your page according to your keyword.
2. Make landing page according to keyword.
3. Rich content should be there. This make user to read about the product.

[cgrantski]

Regarding knowing how long somebody was on a page if it's the only page in the visit ...

There's a pulsing script on a site called the WebTrends Outsider that can be put into a landing page. With a little more work it could be put into any page and only activate if the page is the first page in someone's visit. Search on WebTrends Outsider then go to the "Time on Site" section. We tried the script and it works as advertised.

Awesome site if you are a WebTrends user.