Two of the most widely used metrics for measuring a landing page's effectiveness are bounce rate and conversion rate.

Remember that bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors entering that page who left the site without going to any other pages. Conversion rate is simply the percentage of visitors to that page that converted to customers.

Usually there's an opposite relationship between a page's bounce rate and its conversion rate. In other words, as the bounce rate of a page increases, the conversion rate for that page decreases.

Think of it this way … If a high percentage of your visitors are bouncing off your landing page and exiting your site, that page is not going to be very successful at converting those visitors to buyers.

And conversely, if the page has a low bounce rate, in general that means we're doing a good job of identifying with the visitor's needs and we're in a better position to get the visitor to buy our product or service.

Graphically, if you plotted the bounce rates and conversion rates for the landing pages of your web site, you'd expect the results to look something like this:

So why should we care about bounce rate if we're only really interested in conversions?

Click here to see why >