Jeremiah Owyang, web strategist and apparent Eric Peterson fan, has a decent summary of Eric’s Searchnomics presentation on his blog. One of the comments caused Jeremiah to ask for help on the WAA Web Analytics Yahoo! Group.

The basic question is (paraphrasing here) "Are bounces and bounce rates for a blog home page of the same importance as they are for ‘regular’ sites?"

I have a long and poorly written response to the question on Jeremiah’s blog, but I thought I would respond here as well - hopefully a little more cogently (though no less lengthy) - to Beth Kanter’s question.

Let’s start with a definition of bounce rate just so we can all be on the same page .

Bounce Rate (for a web page) = (Single Access Visits / Visits where the web page is the entry point to the site)*100.

Single Access Visit: Any Visit where there was only 1 web page viewed

Visit: A collection of activity on a site from a single browser where there is no period of inactivity greater than 30 minutes

Entry: Where (which web page) the visit started (a visit-start or visit-entry)

For instance, in May 2007 here on this blog at my home page:

Visits with the Home Page as the Entry: 127

Single Access Visits: 110

Bounce Rate: (110/127) *100 = 86.6% (OUCH)

That means that nearly 87% of the visits that started on my blog home page ended  on that page without any other pages being looked at.

But is that really bad on a blog? Well, what are some of the proposed reason why high bounce rates are acceptable on a blog as opposed to another kind of site?

1. A blog home page (or category page) contains a lot of content in it. For instance, Wordpress defaults to showing something like the 10 most recent posts on the home page so it isn’t necessary for visitors, especially loyal or repeat visitors who are just interested in my latest post to click beyond the homepage (of course, they don’t have to come to the site at all because they are probably subscribed to my feed).
2. Blogs tend to link outside of themselves (link love) where regular sites try to avoid it so on your blog, you are actually telling people to leave and read something else and those visits aren’t actually a bounce.
3. Traditionally KPIs aren’t important on a blog because they don’t measure ‘attention’ or ‘engagement’ very well. Time Spent on Page is a much more effective measure of your blog homepage’s effectiveness than Bounce Rate.

I haven’t done the segmentation yet, but looking at raw click counts I can see that there were 58 clicks from the blog home page to external resources so let’s assume that each click is equal to one visit and that those clicks/visits don’t count against the bounce rate since I directed my visitors to them. That reduces my single access count to 52 for a bounce rate of 40% - that’s still pretty darn high.

Average Time Spent on this blog’s home page in May was 3 minutes 25 seconds. Not too bad I guess. The problem is that this metric typically (and specifically in my case) excludes visits where the home page was the exit page (including single accesses) so this time spent is just for visitors who went deeper than the home page. I don’t know, and chances are you won’t know either (depending on the analytics tool you use) how much time single access visitors (e.g. ‘bouncers’) spend on that page.

I was going to put together some segments to further illustrate my discussion of point number one, but I’m feeling lazy so just let me highlight some thoughts and tactics.

Even on a blog, the home page is probably the most trafficked page you have, unless you get DIGGED or Slashdotted or something like that. The blog home page (and category pages) are also probably the most search friendly ones you have so new visitors are highly likely to enter your site there than anywhere else. So, when thinking about whether or not Bounce Rate is an important measure for your blog, start by segmenting new vs. returning visitors (yes, even though a reported new visitor might not actually be one) and see how the bounce rate compares for new vs. returning vs. all - is the new visitor bounce rate higher than one or both of the others? Then you have an engagement problem - new visitors are not tuning into your content - the home page has no scent.

Segment out your visitors that were referred to your site by search, what is their home page bounce rate? They were looking for something specific and they thought your blog might have it. If search visitors have a high degree of bounce, there’s a problem. User’s who bounce, especially new ones are not engaging in your discussion.

So, even after I excluded the visits that were taking an action I asked them to (subscribing to a feed or clicking on a link outside my blog) my home page bounce rate is still 40%. Forty Percent (4 out of 10) of visits to my blog home page never look any deeper, they never engage in my conversation! That’s a lot of people who are missing out on a great discussion (IMHO)

So, does bounce rate matter for a blog? Is a blog so special that it can ignore this standard web analytics KPI?

Absolutely NOT. Visitors that bounce off my home page, especially new visitors and search visitors are not engaging with my content even though they came to the site in the first place - which means that they thought they were going to find what they were looking for but didn’t…

The one complexity I see here is the home page content. Depending on how frequently you write new posts, the bounce rate can be highly and quickly divergent (really good on some days and really bad on others) so you will want to tie the bounce rate back to the content that was available on the home page during any given period - a lower bounce rate in period 1 compared to period 2 may indicate that the content from period 1 was ‘better’ and you can learn from it.