social bookmarking sites? Bounce rate?

[Laughing Ninja]

What are social bookmarking sites and how do they work?

What is Bounce Rate?

[sfossy]

Bounce rate is a count of how many visitors came to your site and just moved away without spending 1 minute, try to reduce bounce rates.

[Dag_Arbisa]

I would like to recommend you to refer this info: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking

[ChickenFreak]

Originally Posted by sfossy

Bounce rate is a count of how many visitors came to your site and just moved away without spending 1 minute, try to reduce bounce rates.

My understanding is that depending on the analytics package you're using, it may just mean the number of visitors that looked at one and only one page, without clicking elsewhere on the blog - those packages just watch time between clicks on the blog. So a reader that comes to your blog and spends a few minutes carefully reading the post or posts on the home page, then moves on to another site, will still show as a bounce and zero time on site, even though he's really an engaged visitor.

[LloydBurrell]

Social bookmarking sites function on the idea that you can communicate with people through bookmarks. Bounce rate is the ratio between the number of interested visitors and the number of uninterested surfers (one click on your website and then they leave). If you've come to these questions you probably have a big bounce rate. You can reduce it by improving your content and the image of your landing pages. Hope this helps.

_______________________
Lloyd Burrell
Publisher
Office Desk Reviews

[kikolani]

Depending on the network, social bookmarking sites basically allow you or anyone else to add a link to your post to the website. If the post becomes popular enough, it may lead to more traffic coming to your site.

As far as bounce rate goes, I have seen that StumbleUpon has the highest bounce rate from any bookmarking / voting network, meaning that visitors leave without going to more pages.

Key thing is to aim for bookmarking networks that are close to your niche. Blog Engage is great for blogging topics, for example, and Tip'd is good for finance.

[Laughing Ninja]

Actually, I'm asking because I see people using these words and didn't know what they mean. I couldn't find them in the definitions thread.

However, that being said, I probably also have a hue bounce rate :P. Is there any way to check that?

[kikolani]

Usually you would check it in Google Analytics, but I'm not sure if that works with Blogger sites. The only other way I can think of is if your site has enough traffic to be measured by Alexa (Philosophiesofmen.blogspot.com Site Info).

Even if you can't check it, it still doesn't hurt to try to improve it. Doing simple things like linking to your other posts within each post as well as at the end (create a little "If you like this, you might like ___, ___, and ___). Including videos in each post helps too. Basically the goal is to make your site more "sticky" so that people will want to read more of your content and stay on each page longer. I hope that helps!

[DuncanM]

Re: Bounce Rate
If you have a Blogger account, then you could easily create a Google Analytics account off the same Gmail address, and then get it to provide statistics for your blog. I think bounce rate is one of the stats it displays up front (I have never paid attention to it). Otherwise, it is easy enough to judge for yourself the bounce rate just by seeing how many people come to your site and leave quickly (they "bounce" off, without spending a significant amount of time on your site).

Re: Social Bookmarking
This is an entirely separate matter than bounce rate.
This refers to the bookmarking of websites on social bookmarking sites. For example, Delicious (delicious.com) is one among hundreds of sites that allows you to bookmark sites online. These sites can be pretty convenient because they allow you to save URLs online and access them from any computer with access to the Internet. By default, most of these sites make public all saved bookmarks, hence the "social" title. So, if you save a URL, it might indicate that the same URL has been saved by, say, 50 other Delicious users. You could then visit the lists of the other users and see what other URLs those people have saved. Perhaps they have saved some sites along a similar topic as the one you saved, and they might be of interest to you. In addition, if enough people bookmark the same bookmark in a short amount of time, that page might be listed on the front page of Delicious--and send significant traffic to that site.

[spirit87]

In my experience, Alexa's estimate of the bounce rate is not nearly as close as the real number you will get from your statistics, that is, GA for example.