62.50% is bad or good?

I'm currently on 15% on my main forum, which I consider quite acceptable.

Rapscallion

i'm at about 8%

So true. If there is one thing I can give this site credit for is that they do try to eliminate unneeded crap and limited it to this forum. I just had a meeting with my mods about this last night. The steering is exhausting though.

4-Mar-09 / 3-Apr-09
==================
Overall site bounce rate
65.38%

Main page bounce rate
19.14%

Forum index page bounce rate:
55.29%

URL: http://www.szone.us/

I changed the front page / portal to a listing of many subjects vs. 4 main news posts.

Old stats before change:

82.48% Overall Bounce
65.92% Main index (portal) Bounce
16.67% Forum index Bounce

wow! some EXCELLENT improvements :up: :up:

TIPS:
- increase font size just a little bit (portal and navbar links)
- enlarge google search input field and button (increased queries = more revenue)
- tone down the white background (on some monitors the color can be too bright for sensitive eyes - know your target audience)

this isn't a style review so I will stop there
but, I do see other problems with the style

Will do, ya I have a some errors still. -- 38 Errors, 1 warning(s)
I'll get back to fixing html problems in a bit. It was 270 and 30 :D

check the pic :p

No. it is not. I have been over this with many sites.

Most sites that receive traffic mostly from search engine referrals (the long tail traffic) will see very high bounce rates.

This is because most users who search for content using a search engine will click on the site from, say Google, and then they will "go back" if they do not find what they need and select another site (from the search engine). This is the nature of "long tail" traffic.

Almost all sites with high volumes of traffic from search engines referrals have high bounce rates.

So, when you say (incorrectly) "all high bounce rates are bad" what you are saying is "all long-tail search engine referral traffic is bad" because you cannot high search engine traffic without having a high bounce rate.

This is a fact. I wish it was not a fact, but it is.

Forums with 95% of their traffic, which are millions of page views a month, will have high bounce rates. Sites with mostly direct traffic and referral traffic other that search engines, will have a lower bounce rate.

Folks who make blanket statements that "high bounce rate is bad" normally come from sites that have low page views and little traffic from search engine referrals. The proof is in the numbers of high volume sites with mega long-tail search referrals.

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It depends on the nature and volume of your traffic.

See my earlier posts.

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Then you, more than likely, have site with relatively low page views per month from direct or non-search engine referral traffic

urgghhh, that's why I said "when it's high you need to look at individual pages - see what's wrong"

I guess I should have wrote a long message to make things more clearer for those who couldn't grasp the message.

I totally agree with the "long tail" traffic - this is one of the reasons why you need to start looking at individual pages (files - ie. index, showthread, forumdisplay, etc).

Large sites* with 80% traffic coming from search engines should see a "global" bounce rate of 50-65% -- anything higher than this will need tweeking. (Yes, it can be improved.)

(large sites* - 5 million+ page views per month)