Help me lower my bounce rate

I spent some time this lunch-hour playing with Google Analytics. I use it to track access to this site. I take a great interest in visitors here. In fact, even as you read this I’m actually looking at you. That’s me,  behind the third window along in the building above…..

Actually no, but every year or so I check on how the site is doing. I do have some readers (which is nice – thanks for coming) but I also have a “bounce rate” greater than 60%. Anything more than 20% is bad so they say. Of course, once I found this out I had to do something about it. The first thing I had to do was find out what “bounce rate” actually means.  It means the visitors that have been tracked as just arriving at the site, looking at one page and then disappearing.

From a business point of view this is probably not a good thing. It means that around two thirds of my visitors take one look at the place and then go no further. So, in order to make the Google machine happier, I ask you, dear reader, to stick around a bit more. Take a look at Trip Hazard. (New episode coming soon eventually). Discover the terrifying tale of  the Little Brown Ikea Pencil of Doom. Download some free software or a book. Even try to find some funny stuff from the archives.

Comments

[Simon]

People probably hit your blog up every day and read the new posts (presumably on the front page) and then close their browser.

[Me]

What Simon says...

[Patrick de Kleijn]

Websites offering products will lead new customers down the marketing funnel for a sale. A high bounce rate then indicates that you lost the lead, with the task to try and find what it is that drives away the new visitors.

But for any weblog a high bounce rate seems normal to me. You probably get a lot of traffic in through your RSS feed.

I'm reading your posts in a desktop sidebar. Every now and then I click to see the full story in a browser (with pictures, video and all). It may take up to a month before I do that again, so it counts as a bounce in your web stats. However, you didn't lose this 'customer'. I'm still there. :-)

[Rob]

Thanks for that. I must admit that the primary reason I do this blogging thing is for me, and if anyone else find it interesting/amusing/useful that is icing on the cake as far as I'm concerned.

[Jack]

Surely blogs are expected to have high 'bounce rates' though, right?

I mean, i'm not gonna read a year the life of Rob Miles in one sitting.