If you're in charge of your organization's web analytics, you undoubtedly know about bounce rate -- the measure of visitors who enter your site, say "Enh" (or something ruder), and immediately leave, without viewing any more of your carefully crafted pages. Yeah, those people annoy me, too.

But unless you're a consultant working with several nonprofit clients, you're probably working in a vacuum: you know your own site's bounce rate, but you don't know how good it is compared to other sites.

I recently had the opportunity to see anayltics for more than a few other sites, including one with nearly 2,000,000 monthly visitors, and if those are any indication -- they were all above 71% -- your bounce rate isn't as bad as you think it is. But that's no reason not to keep improving! Around here, we operate under analytics guru Eric Peterson's definition of what your bounce rate should be: 10% better than it is now.

As luck would have it, there's an easy way you can use Google Analytics to simplify that job.

Let's dive in. You want to go to the "Top Content" report:

As you can see, in June, 2009, NTEN.org had an overall bounce rate of 61.29% -- from 5,280 viewed pages. That's too many to deal with, so we need to start filtering down. 

First, let's get rid of the blog pages. Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik has said you shouldn't consider blog pages as part of your main site when thinking about bounce rate, since it's the nature of the web for people to come read an article (linked to from elsewhere) and then leave. (That's not to say you shouldn't worry about your blog's bounce rate, but that's another topic entirely.)

You can use the quick filter at the bottom of the content report to get rid of the blog pages quickly. In our case, that reduces our page load by about 700:

That's still not nearly enough, so it's time to employ some advanced filtering. You can find the "Advanced Filter" link at the bottom of the content report. Click that, and then "Add new condition":

I've chosen to filter by "Pageviews", to find only the pages with more than 200 views, the pages we need to worry about the most. You should set your own metric based on your overall site traffic.

That's much better! It gets us down to 40 pages:

I can see there are some pages with "event" in the URL, though. I'd still consider those to be landing pages -- and temporary ones, at that -- so they may be something to work on separately, but for our purposes, I want to get rid of them by adding another filter:

Then, to find only those pages with poor bounce rate (I've gone with 45%"), add a 4th filter, this time using the "Bounce Rate" metric:

Ta da! We've found the 15 worst performing pages (with significant traffic) on NTEN.org:

Notice that these 15 pages represent 25% of our overall traffic. If we spend time working on these few pages and manage to improve the bounce rate significantly, it's going to impact the bounce rate for the entire site.

If this kind of stuff interests you, you might want to check out our upcoming webinar series on Web Analytics. 

Happy filtering!