21.1 % over 12 months, according to Google Analytics. Yay!

30 day average

34.79% Bounce Rate
1,896,518 pageviews
166,437 Visits
00:13:42 Avg. Time on Site


Now the interesting part:

Portal site that helps funnel traffic to the forums - 8.31% bounce rate
MSN bounce rate - 12.67%
Youtube bounce rate - 23.99%
Yahoo bounce rate - 36.52%
Google bounce rate - 52.61%
AOL bounce rate - 55.77% <--- but who really cares about AOL?

1.71% - Bounce Rate
87,351 - Visits
918,315 - Pageviews
10.51 - Pages/Visit
00:05:18 - Avg. Time on Site
61.58 % - New Visits

30 Day Span

I have only just begun collecting my google analytics statistics. It took a little while for me to get going. For anyone else who has not started yet or is a little confused I created a quick tutorial called how to add google analytics to your vBulletin forum. I have two forums that are my biggest concern at the moment. DiscussNY.com has a 66.09% bounce rate, and E-Mail Questions has a 63.46% bounce rate. any thought on either forum would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

-Raymond

Here are some ways to effectively lower your bounce rate. Lots of things go into why visitors come to your site and leave immediately most common are probably poor layout/navigation, combined with lack of content or the site is just hard to use.

Installed analytics a couple of days ago. The board section of customerssuck.com is getting a bounce rate of 18% or so at the moment, though I'd like to have more data before getting a steady picture.

Rapscallion

I disagree that a high bounce rate is "danger will robinson"....

The nature of your traffic is a big factor. If your forum gets millions of referrals per month from search engine traffic, then you will have a very high bounce rate.

Forums with little search referral traffic (or little traffic in general) will have lower bounce rates.

So, to make a general statement without any context that a high bounce rate is "bad" is wrong, very wrong.

My bounce rate is:

Thursday, March 26, 2009 - 62.50%

Quite the opposite. If people are coming to your site from SE then your bounce rate should be lower as they should be there looking for things related to whatever they searched for.

A high bounce rate is bad. Its simple as that. Bounce rate can be affected by your content, design, navigation and external links on a site to just name a few.

The lower the bounce rate, the better no matter what.


Bounce Rate - 22.94% for forum in signature
SE Bounce Rate (approx 38% of traffic) is at 18.33%

a high bounce rate is BAD regardless of where your traffic is coming from

when it's high you need to look at individual pages - see what's wrong
- if your index bounce rate is high something is wrong

a lot of secondary pages (ie. page 2, 3, 4, 5, etc) can have a negative affect on bounce rate (comments usually don't offer any "good" content - not much can be done about this)