Daily Links
Rayguns of Edison Giacattoli
Sean Michael Ragan takes us on a tour of his obsession with the toy ray-guns of Edison Giacattoli, which apparently inspired some of the prop guns in Firefly.Winnipeg Introduces Bike-Friendly Initiatives
With this beautiful weather, I'm going to be digging out my bike... or getting a new one, depending if it survived it's stay in my folks' garage.Daily Links
Why Doesn
Interesting article and great comments about getting things painted white to reduce the amount of energy they absorb. Could offset global warming by a few years and use less energy in warm climates. Not mention white is the new black!Daily Links
This is why you're fat.
Yup. It is a blog about some of the most horrific heart attack food choices you possibly conjure up from your worst (or best) nightmares.Daily Links
ie6-upgrade-warning
Nice bit of open source code in the Google Code repos to warn visitors that their copy of IE6 is old and out of date. I think we will modify this to allow users to close the pop up. Bookmarked for love!Daily Links
In defense of Twitter
But why would anyone want to hear about what some random person is eating for breakfast? - Jason Kottke$500 Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable
Yup. A $500 ethernet cable. These are some of the best reviews on Amazon I would wager. Enjoy!Daily Links
Darth Vader's Helmet Reimagined By Today's Best Underground Artists
If you happen to live in or around the city of Pittsburgh, you still have until May 3rd to visit the Andy Warhol Museum at catch a glimpse of the Vader Project. - gizmodoMost (In)appropriate Logo Ever [PIC]
That poor old Catholic Church just canResearch Indicates Bacon Sandwich Really Does Cure a Hangover
Is there anything it *can't* do? :DDaily Links
Lego Rock Band
Really really real, coming holiday 2009.Why I'm switching back to HTML 4.01
Because I’m done with XHTML is why. Back to HTML 4.01 Strict for now, then HTML5 whenever that happens. - Dave SheaDaily Links
The History of Comic Sans
Love it or hate it, there’s no denying that Comic Sans is an iconic (and very, very popular) font. Emily Steel of The Wall Stree Journal wrote a fascinating history of the creation of the font (by designer Vincent Connare) and the movement to ban it. - via neatoramaXKCD: The book
Three cheers for Randall "XKCD" Munroe! Not only has he just announced his first book of collected toons, he got a fabulous write up in the NYT about it as well. Randall's one of the most consistently funny - and sweet - geeks on the web, and every day he tops himself in finding new ways to be made of awesome.Daily Links
Zeldman's book for free
Rated Five Stars at Amazon.com since the day it was published, "Taking Your Talent to the Web" is now a free downloadable book from zeldman.comUnderstanding Google Analytics Terms - Bounce Rate
Here at Visual Lizard we use Google Analytics to track the site traffic to our web projects. Analytics is a very deep and powerful application from Google. With a price tag of free it also fits most of our client budgets perfectly.
Over the years, we have heard the same questions many times. Today I’m going to tackle plain-english explanations for a couple of the more common ones in regards to BOUNCE RATE.
What does Bounce Rate mean?
The bounce rate number that you see in Google Analytics refers to any visitor that arrives at your site, then immediately leaves without clicking any deeper.
As an analogy think of throwing a rubber ball (the visitor) against a wall (your site). It normally bounces right back to your hand without bouncing a second time (further clicks into your site).
Google defines a bounce rate as "Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page." You can read their definition at http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986.
What is a good bounce rate?
We hear this quite often. While you want your bounce rate to be as low as you can get it, if you get any search engine traffic at all, you will get some bounces. If your bounce rate is 40% or less, then you are doing well.
A bounce rate between 40%-60% means that your site is coming up well in search results, but doesn’t present the information visitors are looking for immediately. Or your site might be appearing in many searches that are not necessarily relevant to your site content.
A bounce rate above 60% means that there are some presentation and or content issues with the site that should be looked at.
So What Should We Do About Our Bounce Rate?
There really is no straight answer to this question. It all depends on the type of site you are running. A huge site with a ton of pages and many articles or pieces of information about a specific topic, will likely have a much lower bounce rate than a small site with a broad topic base.
However, there are some basic things you can do to address your bounce rate. One of the main things is to make sure that your headlines on your articles or pages are actually matching up to the content that is provided on that page.
For example, an article comparing "lawnmower models" should have a headline of "Comparing Lawnmowers from Company A vs Company B for Power, Fuel Consumption and Ease of Use" rather than a title like "Company A is Better than Company B" when those companies might make products other than lawnmowers.
The first headline in this example is clear, details the products you are comparing from the two companies and what criteria you are judging them on. This should get you better qualified traffic to this article. Better traffic usually means a lower bounce rate.
Here is a terrific article from Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, about helping to understand bounce rate and what you can do to try and fix it if your bounce rate is really high.
Hopefully this article has helped shed some light on the bounce rate term as it pertains to your web site traffic. If you have any suggestions, questions or ideas for further terms to cover, please leave them in the comments.