Using Google Analytics Bounce Rates to Gauge Site Stickiness
Buried deep in the guts of Google Analytics is a report called "Entrance Bounce Rates." It's off the beaten path of "Referring Source" and "Total Visits," so it doesn't always get a lot of attention. But it offers valuable information about visitors' habits on your site. Here's how to access the report:
The Entrance Bounce Rates report shows you a list of "entrance" URLs for your site (those URLs that people used to enter the site, whether via a search engine, third-party link, etc.) and the percentage of visitors who left your site after viewing only that page. Thus, if your bounce rate for a page is 100%, that means each person who entered the site on that page viewed that page only, then left the site. Like golf, the lower the number, the better.
If you don't know what to look for, the numbers can be confusing, or worse, useless. But when you filter the data by content area, things begin to make sense. For instance, if we wanted to measure bounce rates on this site for articles written in 2005, we need only enter that folder in the filter box, hit the plus sign, and we have our data.
The filter button is a toggle. When you press the green plus sign once, it becomes a red minus sign. If you press this, it enables you to see the bounce rates for every page except those in the filtered directory:
So comparing the stickiness of the articles written in 2005 vs. those written in 2006 happens in only a few seconds. Use this method across multiple categories of your site to see the rates in your case studies, executive bios, pages within a certain product or service area, and so on. If people leave one area of the site more frequently than they do in others, why is that? Did you offer a call to action there? Did you give them further opportunity to find out more?
Answering these questions requires some time and perhaps some tough content decisions, but it's an effective way to gauge the effectiveness of certain segments of your content - and in turn, create a more compelling, sticky, and (ideally) profitable site.