Yes, it’s your lucky day! It’s time for ‘Visualizations as knowledge machines’! Today we’ll focus on the concept of ‘BounceRates’.
Bounce Rate is the only metric in Google Analytics that people want less of; lower bounce rates, not higher, and fewer bounces, not more. Although it is one of the most commonly used metrics to measure the performance of a website, there is also great confusion surrounding this concept.
Google Analytics defines the Bounce Rate as “the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page). From this point of view a bounce seems to indicate users that are not engaging with your content. The are probably not satisfied by the page they landed on or the content didnt drive them to click through. A bounce connotates something negative; someone who immediately left. But this is not always the case.
If a visitor only viewed one page he is registered as bounced. But Google Analytics does not record time and qualifies the visit as a zero second visit. While this might have been fifteen minutes. A possible solution for this is specifying it in an custom report, for example by stating that users that stay longer than fifteen seconds should not be registered as a bounce.
Therewith it not always appropriate to define a bounce as something negative. People that follow a blog are most likely coming back in a short period of time and the information they seek is most likely on the page they land on. For this type of content it is not necessarily bad if people not further dive into your website and leave. In fact it could also indicate that information is so clearly available that they didn’t need to. Likewise, a low Bounce Rate does not necessarily mean that people happily engage with your content. If low Bounce Rates go hand in hand with high numbers of Page Views, it could indicate that users are unable to what they are looking for even after searching and are leaving your site unfulfilled. In other words: the definition of a bounce remains unclear and its connotation needs to be carefully deliberated, which is highly dependent on the type of content a website concerns. Based on this we have asked ourselves what could be a definition of a bounce in the scope of The Last Hijack.
Starting from Google Analytics’ definition of a bounce there were a few points where friction arose immediately. First, there is the fact that in the case of The Last Hijack, the whole documentary consists of one page (by switching between video’s, perspectives, additional information etc. one stay on the same page without opening a new tab). Therefore, people who fully watch the intro and keep on watching (without interacting by clicking) and leave after seeing the whole documentary would also be considered as a bounce. Second, the users that immediately leave after skipping the intro are not considered as a bounce, while this might be more alarming than user that not interact with the page (as previously described: they are considered as a bounce).
Bounce Rates are not longer used as point of measurement in the scope of The Last Hijack. One could say that it is replaced by ‘went away’ which is a specific user segment within the ‘intro state’. Which tells the amount of users that ‘fully watched’ or ‘skipped’ the intro or ‘went away’ from the page while watching the intro. By specifying a bounce in this sense it concerns users that not interact with the content after the intro; not because they didn’t click, but because they never made it to the ‘main content’ in the first place.
Talk to you soon!