Bounce Rate - Google Analytics - what is good?

[Zascar]

I'm still getting used to the new Google Analytics interface, and I just found out what a Bounce Rate is (It's the % of people who come to your site and leave without clicking on any other pages).

What is a good bounce rate (I know, it totally depends on the site, but roughly?) Currently my bounce rate is 62%, but it is sometimes 50% - that's not all that great really, or is it? I would have thought that someone visiting my site would mostly navigate through a few other pages before going elsewhere.

What can I do to improve this?
Any suggestions?
Thanks

 

[mneylon]

I'd love to know what a good bounce rate is as well

 

[TheMenace]

The bounce rate on one of my sites is 45% - no idea if that's good or not.

 

[Redfly]

It completely depends on the market.

Understand that organic bounce rates are going to be much higher. From what I have seen, the average bounce rate for PPC ads on a well performing campaign with an OPTIMIZED LANDING PAGE is between 30-40%. Which is not too bad.

Normal PPC bounce rates are about 50-65%.

Bear in mind that these bounce rates are just from what I have seen in my own experience.

 

[Fintan]

Looking at your website, your bounce rates need to be put into context.

I'm guessing forums would have a pretty high bounce rate for new visitors as they are looking for information, finding that information and moving on?

However, the metric you should be looking at is forum subscribers, as in how many new visitors are turned into registered users and then how many registered users are then turned into active participants.

So set-up goals in your analytics account and monitor and improve upon how these goals are achieved.

 

[louie]

Bounce rates has to do with the fact that your website comes between the first in search engine results, and the landing page is probably not optimised properly or is not what the user is looking for.
In the case of forums, people search for answers, the SE shows the link to the tread as it is and it has part or whole answer to the query, then the user lands on that page, reads-on and navigates away to something else.

To get to the point, for forums the bounce rate could be very high and you can not really say if it's good or not, but for a normal website that should be as low as possible.

On one of my websites for this month I have a bounce rate of 36.68% while last month was 44.33%