
Measure what is relevant: A critical look at bounce rates - briancray
http://briancray.com/2010/03/03/bounce-rate-measurement-relevance/
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patio11
Bounce rates are also _ridiculously_ sensitive to traffic source. You can do
things which are _screamingly_ net-beneficial for the business and impact
bounce rates in a negative or counter intuitive manner.

If your company blog gets picked up on Reddit or CNN, your bounce rate just
went through the roof.

If your ongoing SEO triples the number of visitors you get from Google every
month and double revenues, you probably now rank for at least a few phrases
which you are not a good fit for, causing bounces

If you make changes to your site's design which clearly suggest to people that
this is not the Facebook login they are looking for, your bounce rate will
increase as your blood pressure decreases.

All of the above suggests ditching bounce rates and concentrating on metrics
which actually matter to the business. Conversions and revenues are two
excellent choices -- most of the scenarios where one says "Our revenues are up
by 100%... DANG IT ALL" are fairly contrived. The only reason bounce rate
persists is because it is very easy to measure without getting buy-in from
anyone else in the organization -- sort of like hits.

I think we've successfully embarrassed anyone who would quote hits as a
meaningful metric out of the industry. Bounce rate should probably be next.
(Full disclosure: at least one guy who knows what he is doing about metrics --
Avinash Kaushik -- disagrees with me violently on this one.)

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DenisM
I respectfully disagree on revenue - it's also largely a vanity metric. I know
it doesn't feel that way (especially when there is little of it), but think
about the seasonality problems and all the things that may compete for users
attention like the Olympics. Revenue is a good indicator over several months,
but it's largely useless for day-to-day decision making.

Far more useful metrics would be engagement among the people who have proven
to be the core audience, likelyhood to recommend the product to others, time-
to-first-satisfactory-outcome, feature use frequency. I am contemplating a
diabolical plan of turning features off and measuring the relative frustration
rates.

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isleyaardvark
A time-based bounce rate measurement would largely minimize all the downsides
listed in the article. (That plus some sort of event tracking for outside
links.) It's unfortunate that's not the standard, default measurement for
bounce rates.

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briancray
By "time-based" do you mean how long they spent on the page?

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isleyaardvark
Exactly. Some analytics programs go by whether they viewed a single page, some
go by visits that viewed page(s) and only stuck around for less than 3 to 5
seconds. Most, if not all, analytics programs measure "time on site", so it's
theoretically possible to segment out the groups that only viewed a single
page and spent only a few seconds on the site, it's just inconvenient to set
up if that's not the default.

In Kaushik's book, Web Analytics an Hour a Day, he defines bounce rate as "The
percent of traffic that stayed on your website for fewer than 10 seconds." So
that's probably why he's so keen on bounce rate, using his definition you
avoid some of the issues listed in that article.

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briancray
Sure - I've read that - but even if you record >10 second visits, you're still
not finding out if users did what you wanted them to do based on bounce rate,
unless your metric is time on site.

I don't think the 10 second rule minimizes all other points in the article.

