Bounce Rate. What a great metric, seriously. Bounce Rate will help you work out all sorts in terms of acqusition effectiveness, content effectiveness and overall site performance.

Let me share with you first of all how Bounce Rate works.

User comes to your site from a search engine (Google, MSN, Yahoo...) after typing in a keyword where your site came up as a suggestion. They're looking for Summer Holidays in the sun but all your travel site offers are holidays in the Snow! Hardly a relaxing holiday break for some (myself excluded).

So, the user sees your homepage (or any other page on your site for that matter) and clicks back to the search engine listings to look at other potential answers to their search query.

That is an example of a bounce. The significant factor here is they only saw one page on your site.

Now, here is the method to work out Bounce. You must not only rely on one report to work this out; so many analytic vendors (and end users of a vendor tool) refer to Single Page Visits report. To truly work out Bounce Rate you need to reports; Single Page Visits AND Entry Pages. Take the Visits metric and divide Single Page Visits by Entry Pages then multiply by 100.

Take SPIWEB as an example (we use WebTrends, AT Internet's Xiti product, Google Analytics and Indextools to track our site performance). Google Analytics, Xiti and Indextools gives you a metric out of the box called Bounce Rate; WebTrends on the other hand doesn't. So, using WebTrends, take the two metrics mentioned above.

We will take the Homepage as an example from Week 40 of 2008:

Single Page Visits =128

Entry pages = 534

Bounce Rate to the homepage = 24%

In WebTrends, you must take the two metrics given above to work this out and identify the page you want to work Bounce Rate out for. There is no standard report available.

So, how can you automate this? SPIWEB builds dashboards for clients (in Excel or via Crystal Xcelsius) to do the maths; you could of course use DataLynx, another great tool to get to the raw data you wish to do maths with to work this out more automatically for you.

So, be wary of Bounce rate. Used correctly it can give you amazing insight into the quality of your inbound referral traffic, campaign offers, campaign channels, search engine keywords (both paid and organic) which can really help you work out how to improve in the areas you are struggling with, without too much bother.