Don't Sweat Your Bounce Rate Bloggers

If you are a blogger chances are that you are no different from other website owners - you want to know if your blog is growing and attracting more people.

When you check your website statistics you will come across a statistic called 'Bounce Rate'. To traditional website types (online stores, forums, information websites etc) this is an important number to keep an eye on. Basically, the lower your bounce rate the better.

Blogs however tend to have very high bounce rates, somewhere up around 80%- 90%. This sort of Bounce Rate on an online store for example would probably spell financial disaster for the store owners.

Hang on, what is Bounce Rate?

A 'Bounce' occurs when someone lands on one of the pages on your website and leaves without viewing any other pages.

How is Bounce Rate determined?

The equation is simple:

Number of visitors who viewed one page / Total number of visits = Bounce Rate

For example:

64 people looked at 1 page / 100 visits to your website = 64% Bounce Rate

Why Bloggers shouldn't sweat Bounces

We now know that by their very nature, blogs attract a special type of website visitor. They are generally people who have been referred to your blog from another website, possibly thanks to them quoting you or because they linked to one of your posts. Twitter is a more recent medium that also spreads the word about interesting blog posts. These people read the specific topic that has captured their interest (and that you have blogged about) and then move on to another website.

Your blog isn't necessarily failing just because your bounce rate is high.

If you are using good statistics software such as Google Analytics you should check to see how long people are spending on average on your blog post pages. Hopefully the data indicates they are staying on your blog at least as long as it takes to read a typical post.