There are many factors

In the previous two blog entries I was telling you how useful and invaluable Bounce Rate metric was and how you can utilize it for figuring out what kind of problems exist on your landing pages.

It is true, this metric is great but not everything is so peachy as it seems. There are some drawbacks as well. One of the reasons is that web analytics is not precise science and it is still at its infancy. There are many factors that can have impact on Bounce Rate metric. This still does not mean that you should not use it in your calculations, just keep in mind that this metric can have some "side effects".

The bounce usually occurs when the Internet visitor leaves the web page or a site before the session timeout takes place. Regularly the session timeout happens after thirty seconds, but we don’t really know the minimum or maximum time that the visitor spends on the page before this session timeout. Some web analytics specialists mention 10 seconds, other web analytics name 12 seconds, and the rest raises it up to 29 seconds.

This seems easy, isn't it? If an internet visitor left after some twelve seconds the bounce will occur. But what if you surfed to some certain web page, and then somebody called you and you left your browser open on that very page for, let's say a minute or so? This happens to many of us on daily basis. Well, the sad fact is that in this case the bounce will also be registered by Google Analytics or Urchin or any other similar software.

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