Bounce %

What is perceived as a exceptable bounce rate?

Would it be higher for the home page or when guided to a specific page?

Any thoughts?

Bounce rate varies according to what's being searched for, what's on the page, etc.

No single answer: if the information they want is on the page they land on, that's probably the only page they need. For instance, I'll regularly only look at one page on Wikipedia.

If your logs/analytics show it, time spent on that page can be a better indicator. If they only spend a handful of seconds before clicking away then either they just wanted a single piece of information or your site was too boring/difficult to use/whatever so they gave up.

This takes extreme self discipline!

Trevor

Many thanks for your reply, some stats from google analytics are:-

350 hits pm

page views 1500

average time spent on site is 3m 45s

new visits 70%

In our opinion are these acceptable

Bounce rate 45%

Average of well over 3 minutes on site sounds good, probably helped by the video case studies.

Best guess is that they're finding what they need on the main page. Whether that's leading to them contacting you is of course another matter - if that's not as high as you'd like, that's the next thing to work on. Websites are always a work in progress!

Bob its all about what's the norm for your business sector. As Trevor said 3m45 is a good number . I would only be concerned about a bounce rate if you had an average time on site that was very low as that would be an indicator that people were clicking on your site then clicking straight back as this would suggest that a searcher was not finding what they were looking for.

Also segment your traffic so you can see the the bounce rate for the traffic that arrives via the search engines to see if there is a difference in the bounce rate and average time on site.