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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't make a lot of sense to count bounces when the visitor doesn't click on another page. The visitor may read the content, by happy with it, and then leave 2 minutes later. Why is that a "bounce"? I sure hope Google doesn't put a lot of SEO value on it, if that's the case.

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Google does not use Google Analytics data for SEO purposes. What they measure are bounces back to the search result list. E.g. User clicks on a search result link, did not like what he saw and clicked the back button after 2 seconds to refine his search or choose another links rom the result list. This shows google that they sent the user to the wrong page (for whatever reason).

Exactly correct, backed up via Google's own search patents, statements, and third-party observations. Google has many ways without analytics to measure this.

That's the definition of a bounce. A visitor comes, they check out one page, they don't interact with anything (reading is not interaction), they leave. This might not be the most useful thing to know for many sites (a simple blog which doesn't have "recirculation" modules / isn't, like larger media sites, geared to having someone come and stay), but it certainly is a useful concept for media sites where pageviews are still king.

But even on a simple blog, bounce rate is a useful stat. Many bloggers don't just want people to come from Hacker News and stay for one article, they want these visitors to click around to related entries after they are done reading. Bounce rate gives a good idea of whether this is happening or not (unless you automatically count almost all visits as non-bounce by triggering an event after a brief time interval).

Agreed. I'd imagined a site like Stack Overflow would have a very high bounce rate.

I guess they have their own method to gather statistics instead of depending on google.

Luckily, it's JavaScript, so you can just look at the home page and see if they are or aren't.

Line 3435 (for me, I'm logged in) holds the answer.

They're the exception rather than the rule. The majority of the time you won't get any value from a visitor unless they complete an action while they're there. That's a bounce.

blog.yourcompany.com isn't doing it's job unless it engages someone enough to share the content / comment / find out more about the product and on...

StackOverflow have established dominance in organic search and buckets of engaged users: not many sites are in the same position.

Track any other action a user takes in-page like sharing/commenting with a GA event.

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