

How 30 seconds dropped my bounce rate by 78% - Encosia
http://encosia.com/2010/04/23/how-30-seconds-dropped-my-bounce-rate-by-78/

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sh1mmer
This article is about how he redefined "bounce" to not include people that
viewed the site for 30 seconds or more.

While I appreciate the sentiment, I consider "bounces" to be a lack of up-
sell. My stats give me a "bounce" rate as well as the average time spent on
that page for new visitors, so I can already see both of the stats he's
referring to. They are just useful for different things.

~~~
Encosia
Since I'm not selling anything, a single pageview can easily be a success case
for me. If Google refers someone to my site and a single page (and/or its
comments) answers their question, I see that as a win. That's where most stats
packages fail me, since they assume single pageview visits are immediate
bounces.

I think it's applicable to other situations as well. Even if you're selling
something and hope to guide visitors down a funnel, an accurate time-on-last-
page metric should be valuable. There's a world of difference between someone
that bounced immediately and someone that read your landing page for a few
minutes but wasn't convinced to take the next step.

~~~
sh1mmer
If you just want single page view stats, my stats give me "time spent on site"
broken down by "new visitors".

I don't understand why you have to redefine the term "bounce" in order to
achieve that. You could simply say that "bounce" wasn't the metric that you
were looking for, or that people put too much emphasis in it. You don't need
to "fix" it because it isn't broken.

"Bounce" is a measurement of people that do not continue to interact with a
site after the first page they visit.

~~~
Encosia
What stats package do you use that gives you a "time spent on site" that's
accurate for a single or final pageview (honest question)?

Most of them take a very pessimistic view. I believe Google Analytics counts a
single pageview visitor as 0s, for example. That turns out to be terribly
inaccurate for my site.

~~~
sh1mmer
I'm using Yahoo! Web Analytics which is not publicly available.

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michael_dorfman
Obviously, the key question here is what the desired action on your landing
page is.

If you're Hanselman, and your goal is to get people to read your blog posts,
then your bounce-rate can be close to 100% and it doesn't really matter-- the
content you are attempting to serve up is all on the front page, and
additional clicks are secondary.

If, on the other hand, you have an e-commerce site like Amazon's, where the
landing page is just the first step in a process that you'd like to end in a
conversion, then a 78% bounce rate is definitely something to work on.

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Concours
interesting article, unfortunately, the title is misleading, but maybe it's
just me.

~~~
Encosia
Sorry you found the title misleading. That wasn't my intention.

~~~
tjic
This strikes me as disingenuous. The title STRONGLY implies "how 30 seconds of
work dropped my bounce rate".

It's really hard to come up with any other interpretations of the subject line
a priori.

It's stunningly good link bait, and the article is deeply disappointing
compared to the promise.

~~~
tseabrooks
Interesting, I hadn't understand that possible meaning in the sentence at all
until reading the comments. I had assumed it was a 30 second reduction in page
load time or some such (Though I suppose it should've been obvious this wasn't
the case... A website with a 30+ second load time would likely not be able to
gain a large audience). Either way, a confusing headline...

~~~
Encosia
I suppose this chain of comments just goes to show how differently we all
think. That was the first title I thought of to describe the topic of the post
in limited space, nothing more.

If you look at the other posts on my site, it should be obvious that I'm not
good at (purposely) writing link bait type titles. Sorry if you feel like I
tricked you. Wasn't my intention.

I only submitted it here at all because I found Clicky's new bounce measure
profoundly helpful. That data would have been invaluable to me years ago. I
thought anyone working on a web startup would surely also be interested.

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chaosmachine
I really wonder how useful the time-on-page metric is. Thanks to tabbed
browsing, I might have your site open for 30 minutes, yet only look at it for
30 seconds.

~~~
iman
The solution is to track mouse-movement/page-scrolling to check whether the
user is interacting with the site.

Also, is it possible for javascript to check whether the site's tab and
browser window is viewable and in the foreground?

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aaronblohowiak
You can listen for the window blurring

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olegk
Your bounce rate didn't change. The title is very misleading.

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kadavy
In Google Analytics, under Visitors > Visitor Loyalty > Length of Visit, you
can find the number of 0-10 second page views, which could be a useful metric
to try to reduce - now if I could make a line graph out if it instead of a bar
graph for the period. Anyone know if this is possible?

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marck_don
Hiii, Hope you all will help in sharing information..

I want to know what should be accurate bounce rate of a blog ?? marck_don

<http://www.adnpost.com>

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gojomo
While the original 78% bounce rate missed people who happily read the full
page and then were done, the new 15% "<30 seconds on page bounce rate"
overcounts people who leave the page up without reading.

When discovering new material (as from HN or long lists of search results),
I'm sure I'm not alone in that I open a bunch of tabs, then slowly work
through them. Sometimes, when I reach one, even if it's been open for minutes
(or hours!), it's dismissed immediately as uninteresting or obsolete.

I've noticed some video sites manage to defer auto-start of the video until I
bring the tab to the fore. Other sites seem to only load (or fade-in) inline
images as I scroll to them. Has any analytics tool added similar monitoring of
foreground-time or scroll-to-end-of-item sensing?

~~~
Encosia
I believe Clicky only continues pinging for 10 or 20 minutes after a page
loads (not sure which; they've changed it up a bit since introducing the
pinging).

That's a great idea about detecting whether or not the tab is actually active.
I don't know how difficult that is to implement without a visible element on
the page, but I'm going to ask Clicky about adding that feature.

~~~
m_eiman
At least "scroll to end" or "scroll more than x pixels" is easy to add, and
would work just as well as long as your pages don't fit on screen.

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puredemo
I stayed for about 15 seconds.

