Bounce rates are moving targets influenced by the availability of competing online materials (think back button), the quality of the keywords that brought them there, and what the user thinks of your site in the 5-7 seconds you have to hook them.

Are the results normal? I dare say no one could say for sure. What we do know is that the lower the bounce rate the more suited your site is to the keywords that brought you the traffic. e.g. the users are finding what they expected.

Ideally, you need additional input from the users - or at least some folks you know well enough to ask for feedback.

would anyone have your newspaper as a homepage?

The writer, who is adding the content, but concerning the visitors, i don t know...i don t have a link on it proposing to make the website as home page. Do you think that this can affect the stistics ?

I read an article a while back by an analytics specialist that indicated that a 25% bounce rate was a floor which he felt was difficult to penetrate. Most sites are nowhere near that number. From my experience most sites are in the 50% - 80% range (which is not ideal).

There are many factors which can influence bounce rate beyond "content quality". Other factors include:

1. Search engine
2. Keyword
3. Audience
4. Relevance of KW to Landing Page
5. Specific page
6. Subject matter

These are quick examples off the top of my head but there are many more.

So, in your case 40% is good. Could be better. 68% needs work.

The time on site metric is also revealing. You should take a look at your log files and examine the number of visitors who spend less than 10 seconds (could be 5 or 20, or whatever your app supports) on site. You'll be surprised by how large the number is. This may be more telling than the average time. The quality and relevance of your content will be revealed when examining this metric.

[edited by: jatar_k at 12:44 pm (utc) on Sep. 14, 2008]

Almost everyone in my office has an online news site as their hompage.
So they hit it everytime they load up the browser, then often leave the page immediately to go to a search engine or a specific URL. I assume news related sites may have this issue.