Problem with Bounce Rate...?

There seems to be an issue with the way clicky is calculating bounce rate. I have two reasonably popular sites, one has a low bounce rate, and seems to be working correctly. The other has a crazy high bounce rate, which didn't make sense because the content is "article based". So I took it upon myself to time a few visitors through the spy function. I focused on a random visitor and timed his/her visit at 9 minutes and 5 seconds. Which makes perfect sense because he/she was probably reading the article on that particular page. Clicky put it down as 5 seconds...Why? That's way off...

Any reasons for this?

What's the site ID?

I think I'm misunderstanding the concept of "Bounce Rate", since I previously thought it had something to do with time spent on a particular site or page. But my site ID is 77454 just in case. Thanks

Oh, I see. Our definition of bounce means the visitor just viewed one page. We want to make it more accurate in the future but that will require some kind of pinging activity from the tracking code, which will increase out load quite a bit. Anyways so if a visitor just viewed one page, currently, we don't know how long they spent on that page. They could have been reading there for 20 minutes reading every word, or could have left within 5 seconds. We just use 5 seconds because we feel that's a somewhat safe default.

So, if you don't mind me jumping in, a high "Bounce Rate" implies that the number of viewers looking at just one page is high. That makes sense.

Now, as it relates to the viewers who do look at one page only, the 5 sec may be misleading if one is interested in knowing how long viewers stay on the website. Which, I guess makes sense because the viewer is doing only one thing on the site, regardless of how long it takes him or her to do it. Right?