The term bounce has a well defined meaning. People going away from your page, without reading it.
And it's not the parent that holds to that meaning, while I (and the article) distort it to mean something else.
It's Google Analytics that doesn't really measure bounce as people mean it. They measure not visiting a second page a bounce (!).
This is not the proper way -- and is probably used due to limitations in tracking ability for exiting a page. And while this might work for a site with a landing page -- where the content people look for will somewhere in another page, it doesn't work for a blog like site. If somebody reads my blogs main article for 10 minutes, that's not a bounce by any stretch of the word.
So what the author does is propose a way to fix GA to properly measure bounce rate the way men and god meant it.
He doesn't propose some alternative meaning for bounce rate.
If anything, that (using an alternative and not true meaning) is what GA does. GA redefines "bounce rate" by showing something which is not the bounce rate.
"Bounce rate (sometimes confused with exit rate) is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and "bounce" (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site."
If the wikipedia article represents the true meaning of bounce, then GA is (technically) correct. It's not about reading/not reading, but only about going to a different page. If a user does not view any other page within the same site, even if they stayed for 2 hours and have read the whole thing twice, then they still 'bounced'.
That said, I still agree with you that conceptually, you might want to measure engagement. And bounce == no engagement made (in this context). However this is a bit more difficult to measure. Even if someone stayed for 20 minutes and scrolled past a certain point, it does not necessarily mean they have read the content. It is a closer approximation perhaps.
I think you're using an unconventional definition of a bounce. For as long as I've been doing analytics (10+ years), a bounce has been defined as "a user visits one page, then leaves the site." The length of time spent on a single page was never incorporated in to bounce rate.
What you're speaking of is the inference that is often (incorrectly) drawn from bounce rate; owed to the misunderstanding of the precise definition.
No, that's not the definition of a bounce. From Google Analytics' own documentayion [1]:
> Bounce rate is the percentage of visits that go only one page before exiting a site.
That's all. That's all it can be, because computers cannot, by definition, know if a user read a page. One can compute a probability, based on things like scrolling speed and visible page elements, but that's hard to standarize under a single umbrella term.
The term bounce has a well defined meaning. People going away from your page, without reading it.
And it's not the parent that holds to that meaning, while I (and the article) distort it to mean something else.
It's Google Analytics that doesn't really measure bounce as people mean it. They measure not visiting a second page a bounce (!).
This is not the proper way -- and is probably used due to limitations in tracking ability for exiting a page. And while this might work for a site with a landing page -- where the content people look for will somewhere in another page, it doesn't work for a blog like site. If somebody reads my blogs main article for 10 minutes, that's not a bounce by any stretch of the word.
So what the author does is propose a way to fix GA to properly measure bounce rate the way men and god meant it.
He doesn't propose some alternative meaning for bounce rate.
If anything, that (using an alternative and not true meaning) is what GA does. GA redefines "bounce rate" by showing something which is not the bounce rate.