Bounce rates tell you how many people only looked at one page on your site and then left it, maybe never to return.

But is that good or bad?

Well, as usual on the internet, the answer is “it depends”.

If you’re selling SEO services to websites and they have a high bounce rate, your eyes will probably light up and little $ or £ signs will appear in your head.

But if you’re running a site you need to dig deeper than just the bounce rate figure.

Always assuming you pay it any attention at all.

For instance, most pages on my site are designed to answer a question – normally a very specific question.

If you’re visiting a news site, chances are you only want to read that news story.

The same logic would go for a recipe site – so long as the visitor has chosen their recipe before they reach the site (likely with a Google search) then you’d expect a high bounce rate as they’d find the recipe, jot it down or print it out, then move on in their life.

So if that kind of thing is the case for your site then you don’t really need to worry about a high proportion of people who only view one page.

On the other hand, if you’re selling a service where you’d expect people to delve around before purchasing or contacting, a high number of people bouncing away after only viewing one page could be an issue.

But even that isn’t the whole story.

Figures – especially when computers are involved – are not written in stone.

The only person who really knows how long they spent on a site and how many pages they viewed is the visitor.

Programs that measure bounce rates have to guess.

They just don’t call it guessing and aren’t usually particularly up front about the guesses or assumptions they make.

For instance, one of the main things they use is called a session.

That triggers as being the same visit within a set amount of time – usually something like 30 minutes.

After that time, it’s counted as a new visit and the first one would be treated as a bounce.

So if your visitors are in the habit of opening up sites in new tabs and then going off to look at other sites and then (maybe) coming back to your site and looking at another page or two, that will affect your bounce rate.

Personally, I much prefer sales as a metric.

I don’t really care whether my sites have a 100% bounce rate or a zero rate or anywhere between those two figures.

I look at the sales conversion ratio.

This isn’t always easy to work out when you’re promoting affiliate products but a rough and ready calculation is how many page views were made versus how many sales resulted.

Or, even better, the value of the commission earned.

So if each page view turns into 10 cents commission that’s the figure to work on.

Raising that to even 11 cents commission can make a very nice pay rise.

So personally I don’t worry too much about low or high bounce rates. I just follow the money!

And personally I think that’s the path you should follow as well.

Of course, if you can get some of your visitors to join your list then that’s even better as you can keep in touch with them over the coming weeks and months, point them back to your site and do whatever you normally do to monetise those visits.