I’ve been reading on how to better utilize Google Analytics to improve your website’s performance. I’ll post some of the really great youtube videos that I found later. But, I have found some great articles, including Bounce Rate: Sexiest Web Metric Ever?, which explains how important a metric bounce rate is. The best definition of bouncerate I’ve ever heard is customers come, puke, and leave. Basically, it means that someone came to your site and left right away because they didn’t like what they saw. But I’m a bit skeptical of Google’s metric. On one of my websites, I have a bounce rate exceeding 60%. Two problems: 1) it suddenly increased one day for no reason, 2) The sites average page views are way way higher than they were when my bounce rate was nearly 0%. Either, Google changed the way the metric is measured, or it’s just wrong. I’m wondering if spiders are counted in the metric, or, perhaps, if average pageviews are not counted for “bouncers”. If anyone can explain why the graph below makes sense, I’d love that.
Bounce rates (yellow line) v. Visits (blue line)
