Bounce rate is a stat you have available to you via Google Analytics and is a key stat for you to examine in your plans for your site to take over the world!

Google defines Bounce Rate as follows:

What does Bounce Rate mean?

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

The bounce rate is given as a percentage up to 100%. The lower the percentage the better, it means visitors are clicking through the various sections of your site. If your content is not engaging your user to click, you need to make some changes. Take a look at your content, design, navigation, etc. and make sure there are no glaring issues.

So what should your bounce rate goal or target be? That will depend some on the content of your site. If you are selling a product or service you likely have numerous pages of content. Obviously users clicking through beyond the homepage is of high priority. I would set my target to be in the 20-30% bounce rate area as my goal. Now keep in mind your bounce rate may also be affected by the quality of your inbound traffic generation. With good SEO, SEM, and other targeted marketing campaigns you can improve the quality of your traffic.

What about for a blog? I think a blog is a different beast all together. Much of your visitors may be return visitors just looking to read your latest post. As is the case with my blog here. Clicking through to other pages is not a high priority. It is mostly new visitors who want to read more about me or read through past posts and interviews posted to the site. I personally, under my current setup have my goal as being between a 50-60% bounce rate. Back in January my bounce rate was steadily above 70%. For the month of May its at 64%. This past week, it is down to 50%! All as a result of keeping an eye on my site, making tweaks to the way items are presented, the content, etc. More importantly I have focused on getting “QUALITY” traffic.

Another item that goes hand-in-hand with your bounce rate is the average time spent on your site. This is a stat that Google Analytics also provides. This is more straight forward to understand and I think you can be the judge of how well you are doing. The more time spent on your site the better. If users are spending X amount of minutes on your site, thumbs up!  My blog is averaging stays of over 7 minutes per visit.