Does it make sense to compare bounce & exit rates?

**ForrestCroce** · 08-02-2007, 11:25 PM

My pages falls into a few basic types: photos, galleries with thumbnails linking to the photos, and a few articles. It seems like I should be able to compare bounce and exit rates, across similar types of pages across my site, along with this new "engagement factor" concept.

The quality of the images will have a lot of effect, but still I try to use this info to focus on which pages I need to improve the presentation or text on. I'm thinking about dropping a few images I'm not in love with, that also don't perform well, to prune things down a bit, and it seems like I should at least consider this data. But it varies pretty wildly. Here are some examples, a la Analytics:

Seattle Photo Gallery - Bounce: 48 % - Exit 19 %
Portraits Gallery - Bounce: 25 % - Exit 8 %
Rockies & Pacific Northwest - Bounce: 27 % - Exit: 14 % - By coincidence...?
California Central Coast - Bounce: 78 % - Exit: 9 %

So, the last one has a few of my better photos, but less overall. Short of driving from Seattle to Big Sur with my camera, how can I improve this page? I might do that in the winter, or early spring, but the Rockies are closer to my apartment and my heart.

Now some examples of the photos themselves:

Amgen Helix Bridge - Bounce: 10 % - Exit: 12 %
Mt Ranier, Sunrise Point - Bounce: 27 % - Exit: 31 %
Big Basin State Park - Bounce: 49 % - Exit: 17 %
Storm, Tioga Lake - Bounce: 28 % - Exit: 77 %
City Hall, Seattle - Bounce: 0 % - Exit: 8 %
Mary's Last Day - Bounce: 0 % - Exit: 5 %

Sorry to drop a million links; it's the variance from page to page that confuses me, and I know examples will help get a better answer.

All of these numbers are based on more than 100 unique visitors, per, and human ones according to Analytics. Two of these have seen about 1,200 and the least traveled is 106. So I could do with more data

but this is a decent sample.

Next question: does it make sense to track these stats across similar types of pages? They all have their own unique content, like any site, be it a blog, news outlet, or whatever else, and I would expect the quality to count for some of that. The city hall photo gets its share of local traffic, and it's not a bad photo, but nowhere near as good as the Tioga Lake one. And yet no one has come into my site through that page and left immediately, while the better image lost more than 1/4 its catch this way.

And how much energy is it worth putting into changing the copy on individual pages? I put directions to a state park in the mountains outside Seatttle on one of my photo pages, and over the next few weeks it continually saw more repeat visitors, more new visitors, and more referrals from gmail & hotmail. But I can't pinpoint all of them to the exact coordinates, and I really don't think I'd want to include directions on every page.