The Bounce Rate

A great lesson in what you don't want to see. How many times do you look at a web site you are designing and have no idea what people really see. When you focus on something, it is hard to see it from the casual person's perspective. But does your organization have the open mind to admit when something isn't working, or are the metrics about rationalizing decisions already made, because it would make you look bad to make a mistake?

An organization that doesn't take mistakes as learning opportunities is an organization which is not taking every opportunity to improve. But such an organization is teaching a lesson: we learn how to bury our mistakes so that we don't have to learn from them.

And burying mistakes rarely improves the bottom line.




What does this have to do with bounce rate? Bounce rate is a failure rate, and failure rates are really the metric we can learn the most from - it is about learning from our mistakes and making things better.