What is a Bounce Rate?
Internet Marketing Dictionary | Bounce Rates

If someone lands on a page on your site and just goes away again, they are said to have bounced off it. So the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on your pages and go away again without doing anything.

Bounce rate detection is not an exact science though because in practice it is difficult to tell how long someone is on your page before they go away again. If they read everything on your site and go away after several minutes most statistics packages will record a bounce even though you may have had started to develop an online relationship with your visitor so that they decide to come back again later.

If a visitor lands on a page and then goes on to another page on your site then they have not bounced. Hence the bounce rate is a measure of how effective the web copy on your page is at grabbing the attention of your visitor.

In terms of your most wanted response, you usually want to manage your bounce rate down so that you have the chance to engage your visitor. You can do this in a number of ways. Clearly good copywriting and site design helps. But you can also use exit pop-ups and other dynamic tools to try to keep visitors on your pages.

A typical method would be to detect when someone is about to leave your page by using their Back Button and at that precise moment to place an offer or new proposal in front of them.