Bounce rate is one of the best metrics available to understand if content is relevant to a user and how engaging your website is on the whole. Bounce rate, however, can be a misleading metric and for many proves insufficient to get the whole picture of the website and user experience.
Fortunately, Google is offering up a tweak to its analytics code that provides support for tracking the adjusted bounce rate. The tweak executes an event when a user has spent over a certain amount of time (ranking from 10 seconds to a few minutes for example) on a webpage. Google Analytics users themselves can decide on the right amount of time.
Once the "event" is executed, the visitor is no longer counted as a bounce even though no additional pageview is recorded. The result is that the bounce rate now shows users who have not met a required "minimal time" (the one that actually bounced as determined by you).
Overall, a very useful feature that will enable website owners to better understand user behavior and the quality of the traffic they are receiving on their website. Google did indicate however that applying this functionmay slow down the user experience and increase the volume of hits a site send to Google which may bring your usage over the limit of 10 million hits per month.
