Google Analytics makes its "Bounce Rate" statistic a key element of its content reports. For each page of your website, the Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who view the page and then immediately exit your site, either closing the browser or going elsewhere. High bounce rates usually indicate one or a combination of these bad things:

• Slow page load, causing impatient visitors to bail
• Confusion: Too much text, busy graphic design, unclear navigation
• Ugliness: Bad, cheesy or otherwise discouraging look and feel
• Errors: Broken images, security alert, or some function or feature failing on the page
• Misleading navigation: Visitors coming to this page expected something different. Maybe you touted an exciting "Free White Paper!" but directed visitors to a bland "New Account" registration page as step one. Maybe your paid search ads appeared for highly specific keywords, but directed clickers to an irrelevant, generic landing page.
  
  

Katrina Gibson has a great post on the topic. Inspired by Avinash Kausik's presentation at the recent Online Marketing Boot Camp, Katrina shares her own experiences with a company whose site sported a woefully high bounce rate for a key page -- 74% of visitors!

Katrina then details the simple and inexpensive design and copywriting steps they took to cut the Bounce Rate of the problem page in half. This is a refreshing, hands-on way to boost anyone's web business: Page by page, when you satisfy more visitors to your website (and confuse and frustrate fewer of them!) your business will flourish.

But be careful: Not all Bounce Rates are created equal. Certain "terminal" pages are natural and healthy places to end a website visit. These include order confirmation pages, sign-up "thank you" pages, customer service "contact us" pages, retail store finders, deep drill-down pages where customers get specific questions answered, or pages that encourage visitors to call a phone agent. Visitors got what they wanted, then they bounced. No problem.

Google itself, on the search-engine side of its business, demonstated a similar phenomenon awhile back with the introduction of "Universal Search." Clicks on search results used to be an indicator of how relevant the results were -- if a user got good, relevant search results, he or she was likely to click through to a destination web page. Click-through was good.

But when Google started including videos, news items, product listings, and images into SERPs that had previously contained web-pages exclusively, clickthrough went down. Why? Because among the results now, are many items requiring no further click: a local business listing, a map, a stock quote, a news blurb, local weather, an image. Why click away when the information you wanted is served up on the search engine itself?

The takeaway is this: Understand your analytics, know when to tell a bad Bounce from a healthy Bounce -- and get working to improve the site experience on your worst, Bounciest pages!