Guy McLaren

1. Bounce rates are determined site wide and right down to very specific keywords and pages. Your site wide bounce rate tells you what percentage of people are coming, puking and leaving.

2. The overall bounce rate can tell you if you are improving or falling deeper in the hole with your articles. Watching the overall bounce rate can give you an indication of whether your site is improving in terms of content offered.

3. Bounce rate by country can tell you where you are gaining the most traction. If you are trying to gain traction in South Africa but your bounce rate in South Africa is higher than in the UK, its possible you need to spend more time identifying with the South African target market.

4. Checking bounce rates by article can tell you which articles are more successful at getting people to continue reading the information available on your website. If you analyse the article bounce rates you can concentrate on more of that which works and less of the articles that are not gaining and keeping traffic.

5. Bounce Rate by keyword can tell you which keywords to focus on. Imagine you are a plumbing supplier and you find that writing articles about “aquila taps” gets a 30% bounce rate but writing about “brass bib cocks” gets you an 90% bounce rate. Where do you focus your efforts?

6. Bounce rate by referrer. This one I adore. You see I know I get a 30% bounce rate from Stumble upon and a 80% bounce rate from entrecard. I know where to expend my efforts. I can focus my social bookmarking on the sites that give me the desired results.

7. Checking out the bounce rate by connection type gives me an indication of whether my site is well enough optimised for speed. For instance we have a 80% bounce rate from dial up connections yet only a 46% bounce rate on DSL connections. The dial up connections comprise 2% of my visitors. The question is do I optimise for more speed or not?

8.Looking at the bounce rate per browser can tell me if I may have a problem with a specific browser not seeing the full picture. There are really two possibilities here. Lets say we have a 30% bounce rate from FireFox and a 75% bounce rate from IE, we have one of two things happening. Either the more technically aware Firefox users are finding more value than the less technically aware IE users or Microsoft is destroying your website and more testing is needed.

9.Bounces by new visitor and returning visitor can tell you whether you are adding to your readership. Is most of your content aimed at existing visitors or are you attracting new custom?

10. The tenth is whether to call me or not. If you need help working out where you are going wrong just ask me.