Google Analytics & Bounce-ing

[Aussie Innkeeper]

I'm going to sound like a total *****, but could someone please explain "Bounce" rates (as far as Google Analytics) to me? I mean, ALL visitors to your website eventually go somewhere else, right? They don't stay there forever!
So, since you can't tell where they go after they bounce off of your site, are you looking for where they're leaving from? Obviously, if the home page has a high bounce rate (and what constitutes 'high', anyway?), then the look of your homepage is turning people off. But, if they're bouncing from your room pages and clicking to book a reservation, which takes them to your on-line reservation system, then that's a good thing. Am I interpreting this correctly?
Thanks!

 

[Madeleine]

The bounce rate is basically who leaves that page without ever looking at another page.
There is also a metric for the page that most visitors exit from. A different metric than bounce rate.
You can use the bounce rate for a lot of things. If you are listed in a lot of different places, have Google AdWords, any kind of online ad, etc, you can see if you are targeting the right crowd by the bounce rate. Really high? Wrong crowd. Really low, good marketing.
If you can see them going from your rooms page to your offsite reservation page and that looks like a bounce in the stats then yes, good thing they are going to the rez page. Can you track them on the rez page to see if they bounce from there after looking for dates and/or prices?
'High' bounce rate, especially if the keywords are appropriate, is over 30-40%. If the keywords the guest used to find you have nothing to do with what you're about then the bounce rate doesn't matter. But you should figure out why you're being picked up for something irrelevant.
We found we had really high bounce rates from a couple of directories. Obviously they were not targeting our market and the guests were leaving our site in droves. Good reason to drop those directories.

 

[Generic]

See www.kaushik.net/avinash/excellent-analytics-tip-11-measure-effectiveness-of-your-web-pages/
Basically you want your rate as low as possible, but expect it to be over 20%. When you see very high rates, that's rejection. But the question is, why the rejection. For example, if it doesn't appeal to people or because it wasn't what they were looking for.
I had a page that was getting high bounce because people were looking up something in Missiouri and the keyword they were hitting was Saint Louis, which is also the name of a local park. They weren't rejecting me, they came here erroneously. But I also found that certain website were using adwords to grind out income and I blocked them from showing my ads. I added negative keywords, people who were coming but I wasn't what I they were looking for. It's a way to see who's interested and who's skimming.

 

[swirt]

IF your outgoing link to your reservation system is set up correctly (from the Analytics standpoint) it should be logged in analytics and should not look like a bounce, if they click on it immediately after landing on one of your pages.