[aichcon]

I'm curious - what are people's experiences with controlling bounce rates on sites that extensively use AJAX? A user could easily visit my page and browse a great deal of content without a second page request needing to be called. As I understand it, even if they spent 10 minutes using the AJAX functionality and left, they would count as a bounce.

I essentially see it as a tradeoff between usability and SEO-friendliness, but I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on it. I've considered doing something where the first click would perform a page refresh but subsequent calls would fall back onto the AJAX functionality but that seems a bit silly.

[patio11]

If you're heavily AJAXed up then bounce rate is a meaningless metric for you. I don't know why you'd spend time optimizing for it -- instead, measure a meaningful metric (such as average number of interactions, or number of visitors with at least one interaction, or -- my personal favorite -- sales).

[onreact-com]

I think there must be a way to mimic the bounce rate in AJAX by firing the onclick event to make it meaningful again.