Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Fixing Bounce Rate between Domain and Subdomain
-
Currently, the way our site is set up, our clients generally visit our homepage and then login through a separate page that is a subdomain, or they can read our blog/support articles that are also on separate subdomains.
From my understanding, this can be counted as a bounce, and I know this sorta of site structure isn't ideal, but with our current dev resources and dependencies, fixing this isn't going to happen overnight.
Regardless, what would be the easiest way to implement this fix witihn the Google Analytics code?
EX: If someone visits our site at X.com, and then wants to login at portal.X.com, I don't want to count that as a bounce.
Any insight is appreciated!
Thanks
-
Hi Paul,
You're right - any click from X.com that takes someone directly to portal.X.com would indeed count as a bounce. There are a couple of ways you might proceed:
- Use Adjusted Bounce Rate
You can read this great post about adjusting your GA code to interpret users that spend a certain amount of time on a landing page as "engaged" and therefore not a bounce even if they click through to portal.X.com.
https://moz.com/blog/adjusted-bounce-rate
This probably won't solve your problem if people are specifically coming to your site and immediately clicking through to the subdomain, but it might help if your blog posts are ranking and being considered bounces.
- Redirect Through An Intermediary Page
If you have the ability to create a page through which you can transfer any clicks, that would solve your problem. For example, you create a "placeholder" page and redirect it to your subdomain. You then make the "portal" link direct to the placeholder page.
In other words, the following would happen:
- User lands on Landing Page
- User clicks "Portal Page"
- User goes to placeholder page (considered "engaged" at this point)
- User redirected from placeholder page to portal
It's not the cleanest solution but it will accomplish what you are asking for. The placeholder page is just there to redirect the user, nothing else.
More important than these 2 strategies, however, is the question of why bounce rate is so important. Are you simply trying to differentiate your portal users from other traffic on your site? Are you worried about negative SEO impacts of having a higher bounce rate than usual? Or is it being used as a KPI of some sort?
Feel free to reach out any time and I will be happy to lend a hand if at all possible.
Cheers,
Rob
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
-
What's Causing My Extremely Low Bounce Rate
My client's site that is reporting an under 10% bounce rate for all sources. Direct is the highest at 8%. I'm no expert in GA but wondering if there is a problem with the analytics/tag manager code on the site. I'm especially concerned about the GTM body script being in an iframe which I read could be trouble. <!-- Google Tag Manager (noscript) -->
Reporting & Analytics | Feb 11, 2022, 5:15 PM | bradsimonis
<noscript><iframe src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-MWGMNW6"
height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden"></iframe></noscript>
<!-- End Google Tag Manager (noscript) --> You can see all the source code here:
view-source:https://nfinit.com/0 -
UTM tracking on a mapped subdomain, is it OK? (DA bonus question)
Hi, This is a technical question. OK, two technical questions. Please bear with me and I'll do my best to explain... We have a WordPress blog (business account, hosted by WordPress). We use it to blog and send traffic to our separate e-commerce site. We use UTM tracking to see which blog posts perform best. Our e-commerce site has a high domain authority. Our blog, not so much. In an effort to increase the domain authority of the blog we have mapped a subdomain of the e-commerce site to the Wordpress blog (still hosted by WordPress). Q1. Will this actually raise the blog's DA? If the blog does get a DA boost, I guess it'll be because Google now sees it as part of a powerful domain. But if it is technically part of the powerful domain... Q2. Should we remove the UTM parameters from the blog? I've read that you should never use UTM on internal links because it messes with your Google Analytics data. But I'm unsure if links on a mapped subdomain count as 'internal links'. Any help would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks in advance. J
Reporting & Analytics | May 17, 2019, 4:16 PM | JabeKay0 -
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29\. We have been building good links from high DA pages and producing quality, regular content.
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29. We have been building good links from high DA sites and producing regular, good quality content. Anyone able to offer any ideas why? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | Nov 13, 2015, 2:57 PM | ProMOZ1231 -
Title Tag Capitalization Impact on SERP Rankings and Click Through Rates
My company made a branding decision to use lowercase for all of our title tags. This, of course, means that our titles on SERPs are all lower case. Overwhelmingly, it seems that websites use title case. This makes me wonder if we're shooting ourselves in the foot. Does using lower case titles negatively impact our rankings and/or click through rates? Is there any data out there suggesting that title case has a better click through rate than lower case? Thanks for reading!
Reporting & Analytics | Sep 16, 2015, 12:25 PM | Solid_Gold0 -
Links On Expired Domains
Does anybody know if a link on an expired domain affects your SEO? I'm just asking because the SEO agency we used before used to create websites and then link to our company - very spammy. We have since ditched this agecny, however they wanted an extortionate amount to remove these links. Therefore, we decided to wait until these domains expired and then the links wouldn't exist. However, I am now completing a link audit and some of these sites are still appearing in the results (obtained from Link Research Tools) but I cannot access the links because the domains have expired. Can anyone help?
Reporting & Analytics | Jun 9, 2014, 4:51 PM | AAttias0 -
Google Analytics for multiple languages on multiple domains
Hi folks A quick question in regards to setting up Google Analytics for a website with multiple languages on multiple domains. The domains that needs to be tracked are: www.example.com -> English www.example.se -> Swedish www.example.dk -> Danish To my best knowledge this can be acheived in Google Analytids using 3 different setups: Different accounts Different properties Profiles What would you guys consider the best approach?
Reporting & Analytics | Aug 18, 2012, 6:07 AM | Resultify
Pros and cons? Have a great day Fredrik0 -
Linking domains vs Inbound Links
Hello, Whats the diference between Linking domains and Inbound links in Open Site Explorer? And also with is most important to analyze? Tks in advance! Pedro Pereira
Reporting & Analytics | Feb 2, 2012, 6:56 PM | PedroM18 -
Google Analytics: how many visits from country Google domains?
Hello, I manage a site with visitors from many different countries. With Google Analytics, it is normal to see the number of visitors from each search engine. However, I would like to identify the number of visitors from each Google-search contry domain. How many visitors from Google.com? How many from Google.co.uk. And from Google.co.zm? And so on. Anybody knows if this is possible and if yes, how can it be done? Thank you in advance, Dario
Reporting & Analytics | May 12, 2011, 11:40 AM | Darioz0