Before you invest in bounce rate

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Before you spend anything on bounce rate, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• A high bounce rate is not automatically bad
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Where it usually goes wrong

Context and page type change what it means. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Engagement time is usually the better signal. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

How to tell if yours is fine

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Three things worth confirming about bounce rate before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A high bounce rate is not automatically bad — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.