Bounce Rates for College Paper Sites

[J. Ryan Zambon (Info. Systems Director, The Hoya)]

Hi All,

I'm trying to get my finger on how The Georgetown Hoya is doing in
regards to bounce rates as they relate to other similar sites. I'm
getting the feeling that we're high, even considering the kind of
traffic sites like all of ours get (lots of referrals from aggregate
sources). If you could kindly post some detail about how each of your
sites seem to do with this stat, it would be a big help. Here's what
I'm looking at over here:

From Mid January to Mid February 2009:

TheHoya.com: 62%
Sports Blog: 75%
Newsroom Blog: 90%
Outside the Gates Blog: 78%

Most articles are 70% - 90%
Some exceptions between 30% - 50%, but very few
Main pages are 18%-35% (e.g. thehoya.com/sports, etc.)


What are everyone's thoughts on the matter in general?

Best,

J. Ryan Zambon
Information Systems Director
The Georgetown Hoya
isdir...@thehoya.com

[Daniel Bachhuber]

Are all of those with CP5, or are some numbers from a Wordpress
install too?

--
Daniel Bachhuber
... is sending this from his mobile

danielbachhuber.com/me
m...@danielbachhuber.com
cell: +1 971 998 5407
aim/skype/twitter: danielbachhuber

On Feb 19, 2009, at 17:20, "J. Ryan Zambon (Info. Systems Director,

[J. Ryan Zambon]

These are all numbers from Google Analytics.

Our main site is Drupal 5
Blog sites are Wordpress 2.7

[MaxCutler]

Those numbers appear roughly inline with our own. Our site average at
yaledailynews.com is 61% bounce, with most of the main/section pages
in the 20-35% range and articles upwards of 70%.

Max Cutler
Yale Daily News Webmaster

On Feb 19, 8:20 pm, "J. Ryan Zambon (Info. Systems Director, The

> isdirec...@thehoya.com

[Joey Baker]

You're pretty much inline.

The Daily Orange does roughly 63% on avg. on the main site. 73% on our
popular blogs. 40% on popular stories.

Bear in mind though: The Bounce rate stat is very inaccurate. Compare
it to your exit rate which theoretically should be 100%-bounce rate.
This is rarely the case. Don't worry too much about those detailed
analytics – they're just not accurate enough to really be trusted.
Think of them as a guideline more than anything else :)

—Joey