Flawed? The accuracy of your website’s visitor behavior measurement is more important than ever before. But sometimes you are not sure if your website measurements are correct or if the numbers are true reflection of your visitor’s behavior. Since, it is the data that guides you on your decisions for spending and optimization, it should not be flawed.

Here, I would like to examine one of the important measures on your website. This measure says more about your content and marketing relevance than any other measure. It is also an important measure of your site’s user experience. Bounce Rate is widely known to be one the most telling metrics you can monitor on your website. The short definition for it is “single-page visits”. It is generally measured by taking the number of visits that included only one page view and dividing it by the website’s total visit count. Since the single-page visits are considered “bounced” visits, this calculation will give you the website’s bounce rate.

Single-page visits / total website visits = web site bounce rate

Like any good analyst, you should also measure bounce rate at the page level. The method for measuring page bounce rate is same as your website.

Single-page visits to page / total visits to page = page bounce rate

To further refine this metric you must determine the weighted bounce rate but that’s the subject for another blog post.

A bounced visit is understood to be a wasted visit. Irrelevant. And the business objectives set out to reduce the bounce rates on websites. However, in reality, not all bounce visits are wasted visits, depending on how your site measurement is configured (as we will examine bellow). A visitor that comes to your site from any outside channel, lands on a page, and then clicks on your Facebook link, may appear to be a bounce visit, but in fact is an engaged visit, not a wasted visit. These visits that only view one page on your site and, because of your well designed content and relevant messaging, do not go to another page on your site, are not bounced visits. They may end up clicking on a link that takes them to a sister site, branded site, micro site, competitor’s site (for service or price comparison), social page, … and therefore are diverted not bounced.

Diverted Visits – I am certain, regardless of your website’s objective, a portion of your bounced visits are in fact diverted visits. Diverted visits are those visits that view only one page on your site, during their visit, but still perform an action you had intended but not captured as part of that visit (eg. clicking on an outlink on that page).

Viewer Visits – viewer visits are also those that only have one page view in their visits, but while they are on that page, they perform other actions that are not captured as part of that visit (eg. downloading a document, viewing videos, clicking on an email link, interacting with Flash content).

How to fix bounce rates – to effectively fix your bounce rate measure you will need to remove the Diverted and Viewer visits from your single-page (bounce) visit counts. The best way to do that is to tag your outlinks, downloads, Flash, Videos, and email links. Some of the web analytic tool vendors, by default, include the logic in their tag to automatically capture clicks on outlinks and downloads. But whether this tag feature is configured or working properly on your site is a different matter. To check if your tag is capturing these link clicks is fairly easy to determine by using a tool that shows you the tag’s operation (HTTP header) as you browse your site. There are many of these tools out there. One of them is called HTTPFox, a browser plug-in. I know this is easier said than done. But the consequences of not checking your tag for these links means inaccurate bounce rate measures. Once you have checked your tag’s operation or have tagged these links manually, the clicks on outlinks, downloads, … are captured and counted as part of the visit. These visits are no longer single-page (bounce) visits since the subsequent clicks on the page are also counted as “page views”.

Other option for fixing the bounce rate is segmenting the single-page visits by those that have clicked on an outlink or download link and subtracting this segment from your total single-page visits before calculating your bounce rate. This tends to be a custom filter or segmentation that is usually not included in your reporting tool and may be more trouble than the previous option.

It is hoped, by many analysts and practitioners, that one day we will all operate from a set of standards for data collection, measurement, and analysis. But until then, the practices we follow today will need to continue to be fluid and improve as the online business practices change and improve.

Steve Bashiri