One of the FIRST things you need to know in order to do effective Internet Marketing is how to view and use web analytics (website statistics) to see how you are doing and where / what improvements are needed.
One VERY useful tool is “bounce rate” which is usually defined as the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page.
That definition is very applicable to what is called “landing pages” – a page which is intended to be the entry point to your site of certain traffic, such as visitors who click on a particular email ad, or who are looking for a certain product.
There is another definition of bounce rate which is more generally useful. That is simply the percentage of “exits” from a page versus the number of page views. In other words, what percentage of the time is this the last page viewed by a visitor.
The more pages someone visits on your site, the more likely they are to turn into a lead or a sale.
So any page that is leaking too many visitors is worth looking at.
Our first target is any page with a bounce rate of 40% or higher.
There are several reasons why you could have such a high bounce rate:

1. It is an entry page for worthless traffic. For example, we have a client who is a book printer. He has a page that lists “standard book sizes.” This page shows up #1 on Google searches for that phrase, so the site gets visitors from all over the world who aren’t prospects for printing; they just want to know about book sizes.
That can distort web statistics. We’ve taken pages like that down, if they didn’t contribute to the site’s effectiveness. You can also use a “no index” tag that tells Google to ignore the page.
It can also be an issue if the traffic is coming from click ads. You’re paying for that worthless traffic. It means you need to refine your click ad campaign.
2. Sending traffic to the wrong page. If visitors are coming from a valuable search term, but landing on a badly chosen page, a lot of them will immediately leave. A good example is landing on a glossary page rather than your home page or a page about the service or product they are searching about.
3. If it is a contact page, a high bounce rate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You got what you were looking for, IF they filled out the contact form. So the key number for a contact page is the percentage of contact forms actually filled out and sent, compared to total views of that page. If it’s low (we like to see at least 20%) you’d better look into what’s wrong with your contact page.
4. A page that badly handles legitimate prospect visitors. There are lots of ways this can happen, so if you’ve eliminated the other possibilities, it’s time to take a close look at the page. Is it confusing? Boring? Doesn’t answer prospects’ concerns or questions?
Your analysis complete, take the appropriate action. Then check the stats again and see how you did. Repeat as needed.
Voila! A more effective website!