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Intranet Bounce Rate

Of late I’ve been spending some time looking at the Intranet Bounce Rate on an enterprise social media project I’m working on for a large multinational. And by Bounce Rate, (rather than Intranet Bounce Rate), I’ll take the definition found on Wikipedia today:

It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.
The formula used to calculate bounce rate is: Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing One Page ÷ Total Number of Visits

The metrics produced by Google Analytics look quite good to me, at least bythe usual  industry standards:

Bounce Rate

As the Wikipedia article cites, this is very good indeed:

Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated:
“It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

But is this good for an intranet bounce rate, or enterprise social network site? A high bounce rate on a large corporate intranet might mean that users are happiest when they bounce away quickly as they’ve found what they want. Here high Bounce Rate = Good? On an enterprise social network site, well what does intranet bounce rate really mean?

Both Bing and Google offer nothing on this that I could see. Indeed when I search for ‘Intranet Bounce Rate’ on Google, it kindly asks – ‘Did you mean Internet? ‘!!

p.s. One interesting point – Saturdays generate the high spikes.  Why?

p.p.s. Some excellent resources from my old colleague at Derby Uni, Dr Dave Chaffey to mull on. Bounce rates in Web design articles

3 replies on “Intranet Bounce Rate”

Yes Russell, I’ve not heard much discussion about intranet bounce rate – it’s interesting what “good” is. < 30% certainly seems good compared to most public sites.

But like conversion rates, overall site bounce rates are almost meaningless except to compare/trend through time.

Where this will become more interesting is the insights you get from segmenting bounces using advanced segmentation or looking at bounce for different page – which bounce most or which times of day? It depends how many pages have outbound links on.

Whether people bounce when they first log-in would be interesting. Exit pages too.

Finally remember that bounce depends on the default setting for visitor session timeout in Google – default is after 30 minutes of inactivity. So if someone just loads home page then does other stuff and uses later this will still be counted as a bounce even though they haven't bounced. So think that for intranets you could reduce bounce rates by increasing this default to a day.

Maybe it's something members of the Intranet Benchmarking forum discuss – perhaps you could post on their blog.

Dave

Thanks for this Dave. Incidentally the timeout in this instance is just 20 minutes of inactivity due to security reasons. I’m starting to think that this has to be something that needs benchmarking rather than defining and wonder what the IBF have here.

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