If you’ve installed Google Analytics or another analytics tool, there are loads of juicy metrics just sitting there waiting to be digested. But if you’re new to web analytics, then I’d recommend starting with one of the easiest metrics to get to grips with - the bounce rate.

Your bounce rate measures the percentage of web visitors that arrive on a page within your site, and then leave the site without visiting more pages.

In other words, the person arrived at your site, didn’t find what they wanted, so they clicked away again without delving into your site any further.

So what are the red flags you should look for to allow you to take some actions quickly?

First off you want to check out what pages are turning visitors away - if some of your key sales pages have high bounce rates, then you’ll obviously want to look at improving them pretty quickly (I recommend using Google Website Optimizer to start testing variations of your landing pages).

Then you want to compare the bounce rates of different traffic sources to help you understand which of your marketing efforts send the best traffic. You can then use this info to better target your budgets or time.

Lastly, have a quick scan through bounce rates for each search keyword. This will help you to start to filter out low quality keywords from PPC campaigns.

Your bounce rate is such a quick and simple way to start to get a handle on the quality of your website traffic. Its the perfect place to start making sense of your data, and it’ll give you some ideas on what needs attention asap.

p.s. In Google Analytics, you can view your bounce rates quickly by checking out the Bounce Rate report under:

Visitors > Visitor Trending > Bounce Rate.