Engagement metrics - Bounce rate

[priyankagupta20]

Dear Team,

Adobe Analytics is reporting an 80% bounce rate for the website, but the average time on site is 3 minutes. The client is confused about whether users are engaged or not. I explained that the high bounce rate means users are spending time on the site but not interacting with it.

Could you please advise on how to explain this more clearly to the client? Also, what other engagement metrics should we focus on for a health content website? It would be helpful to have some simple examples.

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Keep in mind that the 3 mins average time would be calculated from the non-bounces.... Adobe is not a heartbeat system... it's engaged time is a calculation between time stamps.... if a user bounces (which by Adobe's definition means a single server call in a visit), then there is no second timestamp available for calculation.

What type of site is it in general? Different site types will lead to different behaviours... for instance a news / blog site would have a tendency to have a higher bounce rate... people would see an article or blog post that interests them from a search result or social media site, etc.. they click in, read the content then leave... 

Whereas an ecommerce site is much likely to have more pages / actions per visit as people are shopping, putting items into their carts, etc....

Understanding the nature of the site would help us to make suggestions about engagement.

In the meantime, have you broken down bounces by pages or page types? Does the site have multiple subdomains that might not be identifying the users across the visits properly? 

[priyankagupta20]

Thank you for clarifying how Adobe calculates the average time on site. I understand that the 3-minute average only applies to non-bounce sessions due to Adobe's use of timestamps for engagement.

The site in question is similar to GSK.com and primarily serves as a health content site. However, I cannot disclose the specific website here.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

No worries, I don't need the specific site.. just curious about the type of content.

So I see that GSK.com has a mix of article type content, but also products... not sure if your site has a mix.. I would think that trying to see the bounce rate per page type / section would be helpful. Along with stats like articles per visit (and don't forget to break down by device type.. as desktop and mobile users tend to consume information differently).

If you have products, you could create a visit segment for people who go into products, then create engagement stats around that... products viewed per visit, adds to cart (or if products are to vendors, you could look at exits to those vendors), etc.