Bounce Rate

Chris and I were going over Google Analytics the other day as she recently got the add-on going on her blog, and got thinking about Bounce Rates. She thought that it was the percentage of visitors who upon coming to the site, left in a certain amount of time realizing that it was not what they wanted at all. I had looked it up before, but had since forgotten what I had learned so I decided to look it up again this morning.
Bounce rate represents the percentage of initial visitors who bounce away to a different site rather than staying within the website (go to other pages within the same site). According to Wikipedia, there is a formula to calculate your bounce rate:
Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing One Page / Total Number of Visits
A visitor can bounce in a number of ways including; clicking on a link that sends them to another website, closing the window or tab, typing in a new URL, using the back button (to send them to a site other than your own) and/or session timeout (which is usually about 30 minutes).
According to Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik, "It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying". This statement may be true for actual websites, but in my opinion, when it comes to blogs and other informative sites, the percentages should be higher. I think blogs are much more of a daily read sort of site than one you would come to and go from post to post. The Wikipedia entry on Bounce Rate seemed to agree with me and stated that metrics such as returning visitors vs. new visitors might be more informative.
This being said, I am no longer going to care to much about my 70% Bounce Rate here on the Great Abyss, but rather focus on my 72:28 returning to new visitors ratio. I think it is a good ratio where most of my readers are returning (I must be doing something right) but I still have a decent percentage of new visitors coming in. This statistic is better used over time, where your returning would increase ever so slightly...right?

Top Content

Through the magic (and sometimes creepiness) of Google Analytics I have been able to determine the Top Content (most visited posts) on each of my blogs. I have put the lists on each blog somewhere near the links section. I hope that this enables readers to catch up on my most popular posts. I also find it kind of interesting and hope that they will change as we go along and I post about newer topics.

Google Analytics

I had signed up for Google Analytics quite some time ago and apparently never but the necessary code in my html for this (and my other) blog(s) - oops. So a couple days ago I finally realized this and put the code in the proper place. I can now track pretty much everything about my blogs: how many people come on the site, how long they tend to stay, which posts are being read, where the people are from etc. I won't be using it as I am sure some larger sites would, to collect data about their visitors and use it to their advantage, this is merely yet another way for me to amuse myself and even better - procrastinate from doing actual work while at work. I love gadgets that assist in slacking off at work.