TechNayak

I am a wannabe webmaster, I ever so often get involved in discussions with webmasters and build engineers about hosting, reliability and optimization tricks and so on. I am also a big fan of analytics and web site metrics. My experience spans with my first tool webstat, webalizer , awstats and then graduated to Google Analytics. I am interested in the dynamics of a website, what gets your visitors there, what keeps them there, what are their turn offs and so on. My own blog has been an experiment with analytics, I keep track of my stats and compare them to my site’s design and usability and yes they all culminate to one wierd mass of analytics mess that needs a lot of time and patience to comprehend.

Of some of the metrics that I found interesting apart from interestingness , entry points, exits , pageviews , timespent etc I liked the bounce rate very much. Yes bounce rate is the most amazing metric when it comes to the web.

  In a nutshell bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave “instantly”. - Avinash Kaushik

Sites with good content have very low bounce rates, that coz users stay on the site for longer than just their immediate need. This metric is extremely important to consider as it could lead to some startling discoveries. Bounce rates directly translate to your site’s usability and design. A complicated design often confuses a user and he or she tends to leave a site if the site seems too cluttered ( which is why I hate GoDaddy’s design ). A blank design with no navigational links is also bad. Once the user finishes reading what he/she came to read, you need to coax them to stay longer. Either by giving them sneak peaks of other related articles or any abstract writeup, tags, internal links and so on. For bloggers, please do read this article to make a list of things to lookout for when picking your blogs design.