The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website who did not stay longer than a few seconds and who only viewed one page of your content (only the page they arrived on). These visitors click away or figuratively ‘bounce away’ from your site rather quickly.
The formula for calculating bounce rate is:
total visits viewing one page ÷ total visits = bounce rate
So if 800 visits were made to your web page and 20 of them only viewed one page your bounce rate would be:
20 ÷ 800 = 2.5% bounce rate
In order to accurately measure bounce rate you must associate web analytics code, like Google Analytics, with each web page of your site. Web Analysis is a sophisticated skill that involves much more than just reading numbers. You have to understand how to interpret them given the many factors involved.
For example, web pages that experience a high bounce rate may need to be search engine optimized to ensure the content is highly focused and targets a very specific audience interested in the content it provides. On the other hand, a very well optimized web page may experience a high bounce rate because the call-to-action is a phone call; it takes a few seconds to write down a phone number and then close the web page because the user got the information he wanted. In cases like these it is very important to extend tracking to include actions occurring offline. With accurate information from both online and offline results a proper, more helpful determination can be made about the significance of the recorded bounce rate.
