I am working my way through Avinash Kaushik’s excellent latest book, Web Analytics 2.0 – the Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity. I have been looking for a crash course in web metrics to quickly render me an analysis ninja, and this is definitely fitting the bill so far. He writes in a very personable style, easy to understand – highly recommended. Avinash also donates 100% of the proceeds to two charities, so deepen your knowledge while helping those in need!
One thing he highlights in Chapter 3 as he talks about different web metrics is Bounce Rate, which is when a visitor comes to a single page on your site and then leaves with no further interaction. He describes this as almost always bad, as the user is not interacting with the site. The one exception he cites is for blog posts, where it is expected that the regular blog reader will just go to the post, leave and then exit. He further mentions a way to review site exits is to contrast Bounce Rate (mostly bad) with Exit Rate, which is how many people left the site from a particular page (not bad or good, hard to measure why). If a Bounce Rate is low but the Exit Rate is higher, then in general users are just leaving from this page, but it is not strongly negative.
For those of us in Technical Support, however, both Bounce and Exit Rates are valuable metrics; if we have a Knowledge Base which is well-indexed by search engines, and the article is well-written to solve a particular issue (and has no other links), we would expect a successful article to have a high Bounce Rate. This means the customer who was searching for an answer found our article through web search, and it answered their issue. A high Exit Rate would show that the user was searching on our site for an answer and once again, found the article and left, problem solved.
Of course there is always the chance they became frustrated and just chose to leave, but in most cases I believe we can assume they would refine their search, looking for a satisfactory answer before giving up and leaving. This also highlights the need for KB articles to have a tool for customer rating and/or feedback.
