Exit rates - what is "average"?

[biggles]

Wondering what people's thoughts are on what are typical figures for visitors arriving at a website and then exiting after the landing page. In other words, clicking in and then clicking out of a site.

A client of mine has over 50% of visitors arriving at their site from search engines immediately exiting after landing on the site. I suggested this is because the homepage lacks sufficient content to entice visitors further into the site. In otherwords the site doesn't immediately look like it will satisfy the query and people are bailing out of the site.

My client said they thought a 50% exit rate would be typical for most websites. What do you think? Are their any meaningful avergage figures?

Thanks

[IanTurner]

On 4 of my sites I am seeing the following

33%
35%
48%
49%

So I would suggest that 50% is not an unusual figure for single page accesses