Google Drop the Ball with Bounce Rate Jibe?

by Lucy Griffiths on 5th March 2009

Clearly you need to be talented to work at Google. Sometimes though, this can lead to a superiority complex and following hot on the trail of Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, calling Twitter a “poor man’s email”, it’s now been reported in MediaPost that their analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, has made a comment that “hits”, far from being a way of measuring online success, is actually an acronym standing for “How Idiots Track Success”.

Whilst there may be a degree of truth in the point, the way the message was delivered could have been delivered more subtlety.

In terms of success criteria, he does goes on to make a valid point that bounce rate is a more meaningful measure of how successful your site is performing. Obviously, there are many ways to drive traffic to a website but if visitors aren’t finding what they want when they arrive, why bother spending time and money on getting them there in the first place?