Bounce rates plummeted
-
In Google Analytics, my average bounce rates plummeted basically overnight. I went from a consistent average daily bounce rate of about 65% to an average daily bounce rate near 5%. My average number of visitors has stayed the same. I don't think there is any significant change I made to my site that may have caused this. Has anyone else had the same problem and know why it happened and how to fix it? Thanks in advance!
-
I was just about to reply with check your analytics tools. I had the same issue happen on a WP site, and it was because I had two copies of GA running. Glad you figured it out, but so sorry that wasn't your true bounce rate!
-
Good to hear you worked it out
-
For anyone who else who may be curious, I ended up figuring out what the problem was. We had installed a WordPress plug in to track outbound links from the site so a lot of people that left the site were being recorded as having an event and therefore were not a bounce. When I disabled the plug in our bounce rates went back to normal.
-
I havent done the maths, but yes that sounds about right
-
Our Pages/visit average did also go up by about 2 pages around the same time. Would that be enough to account for a 60% drop in bounce rate??? A 5% bounce rate seems too good to be true.
-
has you Pages/Visit gone up?
if your bounce rate goes down, you would expect Pages/Visit to go up.
-
The low bounce rate is great. If the data is accurate. My concern is that the data is not accurate. We went from about 65% to 5% in 2 days yet we made no changes on the site.
So in other words, if it we had done something to create the dramatic decrease, that would be great. But we did nothing. And given the huge decrease we are left to wonder if there is a problem with the data.
Thoughts?
-
Fix it? A low bounce rate is good. it means 95% of people are visiting more the one page of your site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
In Google Analytic Experiment I want to Judge Performance of Page Along with Pageviews, Bounces, Transaction etc
Hi All, For my ecommerce site for mobile site category page I have redesign the page in 2 different ways so one original page and 2 new designs. Now I want to do A/B testing with google experiment. I want to measure performance of page via pageviews, bounce rate, exit rate, conversion rate, add to basket etc. Now in objective for this experiment I can select anyone thing either Pageviews, or bounces or transaction or goal. So my query is 1) I cannot select all objective together? 2) or for same page I have to create too many experiments by selecting each objective? 3) exit rate or add to basket objective is not in experiment list so? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | dsouzac0 -
Why might my websites crawl rate....explode?
Hi Mozzers, I have a website with approx 110,000 pages. According to search console, Google will usually crawl, on average, anywhere between 500 - 1500 pages per day. However, lately the crawl rate seems to have increased rather drastically: 9/5/16 - 923
Reporting & Analytics | | Silkstream
9/6/16 - 946
9/7/16 - 848
9/8/16 - 11072
9/9/16 - 50923
9/10/16 - 60389
9/11/16 - 17170
9/12/16 - 79809 I was wondering if anyone could offer any insight into why may be happening and if I should be concerned?
Thanks in advance for all advice.0 -
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
Hello, I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me. We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account. The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
Reporting & Analytics | | EricFish
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm. 2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site. The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site. If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you. Thanks for your help. Eric0 -
Google Analytics and Bounce Rates Query - Should I block access from foreign countries ?
Hi , When I look at my google analytics for my UK Website, I can see alot of visits come from outside the UK , i.e Brazil and USA. Both of which give me almost 100% bounce rates from people visiting from there. I am wondering, if google looks at bounce rates with regards to ranking factors and should I therefore block access to my site from visitors outside the UK ?... Would this help increase my rankings ? Given that we only serve uk customers, I cant see any benefit of allowing non uk customers the ability to see the site . what does people think ? thanks pete
Reporting & Analytics | | PeteC121 -
Conversion Rate Higher Than Landing Page Visits?
Interesting to see in Google Analytics that the conversion rate is higher than landing page visits - could it be attributed to a visitor clicking the CTA button multiple times? Or perhaps there is duplicate GA code on the conversion page since we utilize both Google Analytics and HubSpot. (see attached funnel screenshot) Screen-Shot-2014-09-26-at-10.49.09-AM.png
Reporting & Analytics | | W210 -
Identifying conversion rate for product
Hi, I need to identify the conversion rate for a product, lets call it a spanner. I have 100s of spanner product urls and I ensured that the url protocols must include the product name e.g /red_spanner so its easy for me to work out the conversion rate in analytics for all my spanner pages as I just add 'spanner' to the landing page filter, hit the ecommerce tab and bingo. What I cant figure out is how to work out the conversion rate for all spanner sales which includes alot of sales which didnt originate on spanner pages e.g. home page > search result > checkout. Theres 1000s of variations of this e.g. email > home > search > product page > checkout. How can I work out the total conversion rate for spanners which needs to include: people landing on a spanner page and people who didnt arrive at a spanner page and did a search with eventually got them to the spanner pages. Hopefully its not as complicated as I think! Thanks in Advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | AndyMacLean0 -
If a page bounces in the woods, can Google Panda hear it?
I have read that after the Panda update a site's bounce rate is an important ranking metric. However, can anyone confirm whether all pages count equally? For instance, my home page gets 5000% more traffic than Deep Page X. If Deep Page X has a poor bounce rate, does it matter as much as if my Homepage has a bad bounce rate? I am guessing not, but wanted to open it up for discussion. If not, it has me wondering on what to do for some of my database driven content. I have some dynamically created pages that have higher bounce rates and minimal unique content. They aren't pure spam or junk, but are likely only about 1% unique from one another. Sounds like a no brainer change post-Panda, right? Well, what if I was the only one targeting the keywords for these pages? The pages pull from info I stored on the U.S. government stimulus program (related to my industry). It then has just about every city, state and county combo in the country for my product. For instance, a page <title>might be "Flemington, NJ Widgets - Somerset County". Something that no one else is targeting and drives minimal traffic.</p> <p> </p> <p>Do I take this content down? I didn't have any affects, positive or negative from Panda, so I am hesitant to take down thousands of Google cached pages.</p></title>
Reporting & Analytics | | TheDude0 -
Bounce Rates - How would you deal with this scenario?
Greetings! I actually don't have a definitive answer to this so wish to throw it out to the community for thoughts and feedback. I have a client who we shall call "Site 1", but they also have a job board, we shall call "Site 2". A product of their own success, they have a high bounce rate with visitors landing on Site 1, seeing a job they want to apply for and bouncing straight off to Site 2. The problem is that this is resulting in Google seeing some of these pages as having bounce rates of 80% to 100%, based on this formula: Bounce rate = total number of visits viewing only one page / total number of visits Now, I hate anything black hat or grey hat so wish to know how you would deal with this... If the results from Site 2 were displayed in a new framed page on Site 1, would this still be classed as a bounce? If when they click on a job on Site 1, they were taken to an intermediate page on Site 1 saying "Thank you, you are being redirected to your chosen job" for 5 seconds before being taken to Site 2, would this be classed as a bounce? Perhaps the job they wish to apply for 'pulled' from Site 2 and actually displayed in a new page on Site 1 would be a better way to go? I think that option 1 might work, sure that number 3 would but not so sure about number 2, but look forward to your comments and thoughts. Regards, Andy
Reporting & Analytics | | Andy.Drinkwater0