“A high bounce rate (over 50%) isn’t good; above 70% is bad.”

I tend to agree but this is not always the case. If I want to know why Elephant And Castle is named that way, I’ll google it then land onto a Wikipedia (or better, Wikiwand) page, read the article and leave. I assume Wikipedia pages may have 90+% bounce rate because this seems to be the default behaviour, but does this make Wikipedia less effective?

I used to be a successful food-blogger and, more often than not, people mostly came to my posts after searching for a specific combination of ingredients/recipe keywords search. I managed to write in way that was engaging enough to have the users wanting to explore more, but if they were leaving after the first page, because that page was all they wanted, would you say my blog was not delivering or fulfilling the expectations because of the high bounce rate? Having quit writing 4 years ago and still having more than a thousand unique visitors per day (down from 12K when active), I wouldn’t say so.

But in general, needing to engage with users and having them spend more time on our sites because this will generate a higher profit I do agree that the goal should be to reduce the bounce rate as much as possible… basically for everything outside of blogs, news, events, etc.
Be also careful of very low bounce rates: when nobody’s bouncing (less than 20%) it doesn’t necessarily mean that the site is good. The script may be badly implemented or the pages may be designed in a way that forces users to take at least one action (landing pages?).
So, don’t stop at the bounce rate analysis but keep going with all that @mrjoe has described further in this good article :)

I’m curious in how you came up with your persona in these situation? Without at least some research, how accurate is the persona?

Thanks for the great article!