Analytics bounce rate change
-
Hi mozzers,
I have a little riddle. A few weeks ago the bounce rate on one of our website dropped 90% - from 45 % average to 5 % average. We haven't changed much in the code of the site, layout or anything else. The traffic is pretty stable too.
Anyone can guess why? Or have experienced something similar?
-
Thank you Keri. Such a speedy response!
And NOW it makes sense. So happy to have that resolved.
-
Having it there twice can cause issues. I myself have an old post with this exact issue. What happens is that the tracking code fires twice.
My simplistic understanding, which may be good enough here:
Firing only once in a session: visitor didn't go to any other page, they're a bounce.
Firing more than once in a session: visitor did something else! they didn't bounce!
IIRC, my pageviews and pages per visit were also higher. Get the duplicate GA code off, and make an annotation in Google Analytics itself of what happened, so six months or two years down the road someone can look and understand why the metrics are wonky for that time span.
-
I know this is an old thread, but it might be exactly what I need.
A client site has seen a dramatic drop in bounce rates. They were making changes to the site layout around the time bounce rates suddenly dropped. I can see that they have Google Analytics installed twice on all pages. Could that be the problem?
If yes, why would having analytics installed twice cause the bounce rate to drop dramatically. Are the other site metrics reliable?
Any help would be much appreciated!
-
Yep, if you integrated any Facebook features around that time, there's a known FB bug that causes any visitor using Internet Explorer to re-load the page with "?fb_xd_fragment=" appended to the URL.
If you're being affected by this bug, you can look at behavior across browsers (FFX and Chrome are not affected by this bug), or you can search for URLs with that query string in them. The bug has been around for over a year, but FB has assigned it a P5, so not clear on when a definitive / easy fix is forthcoming.
-
Seems like a new post click overlay.
Thanks for the "next page" tip Greg!
-
Most likely something on your page is sending multiple calls/hits to Google. I've seen this happen with Facebook Connect. Look at the Navigation Summary report for pages that have this lower bounce rate to see if the "next page" is the same page (aka a self-referral). If so, that's your issue.
If you've started tracking Ajax interactions, that will also lower your bounce rate.
-
I've seen abnormally high bounce rates coming from a non 301 redirected domain before. Did you change the direction of any of your domains?
-
Ah! have you seen this?
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Analytics/thread?tid=57d6431b146c86a2&hl=en
-
No the data are site-wide, so the bounce rate has dropped on all pages. And the GA code is not installed twice. It's very strange.
-
Something accidental where you serve two pages? Or have your analytics twice on the page?
-
Hi Elias
Thanks for checking. I checked a bunch of other websites too, with no change.
And yes, the change is similar on all traffic sources.
-
Hi Thomas,
That's very odd! I've just checked some of our sites but none of them have seen anything like that.
As you haven't changed much in terms of layout then it would appear that there is a problem with your analytics tracking.
Is the change in bounce rate constant across all traffic searches i.e. search, direct etc?
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
-
Google Analytics & Google Sheets
Hi guys, I'm looking to use google analytics google sheets extension to pull data into a google sheet with metrics from other tools e.g. semrush, moz, etc. From my understanding with google analytics google sheet extension its designed to run reports and doesn't really allow you to add other metrics. Basically what i'm trying to do is this: https://www.useloom.com/share/c1e42bfa60bd46fca2b1120018969ce8 Any suggestions/advice on how to do this would be great. Cheers.
Reporting & Analytics | | jayoliverwright0 -
Google Analytics global page empty
Hello, I don't know what happened with my Google Analytics initial page. For around a week I have there all my websites, but they show no results on global page. If I enter on any property I can see everything as normal, just not on the initial page. Screenshot: http://imgur.com/JKFVIh4 For sure I changed anything that I shouldn't. Perhaps you know what's wrong? Thank you in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | prozis0 -
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 -
Splitting Google analytics data
Hi Everyone I'm not sure if this can be done but thought i would ask anyway. One of our clients has a website which is a 3 tiered website, basically this means different access levels for different users depending on their ip address. The split is as follows (business 1, business 2 and the general public all see different things and areas within the website) Now what we are wanting to do is essentially split our analytics data for each of the 3 different users on the site, Can this be done through Google analytics? Thanks in advance. ps If im not clear enough let me know and ill try clear it up
Reporting & Analytics | | TheZenAgency0 -
*Dramatic* reduction in bounce rate, why?
Hi all I cannot pin this down to one of -new theme using Thesis 2 and Social Triggers, or -implementing Moz Does the Moz crawler linger on page? I'd love to know why this is happening 7iSnNfC
Reporting & Analytics | | TimMarsh0 -
Long tail analytics
I've been playing with google advanced segments, but can't work out how to do this: Show all the keywords and traffic that send between x and x number of keyword searches per month. I'd like to have 3 different segments to show short, long and midtail keywords. Can anyone help?
Reporting & Analytics | | PeterM220 -
Google Analytics/ Contact 7 Plugin
I have a site that uses the contact 7 plugin for its contact form sitewide in a sidebar and on a contact us page. I've set up a goal in analytics and tracked using the "on_sent_ok" hook but the number of goals GA is creating is far outweighing the number of times the form is actually completed. I figured my initial mistake was to use the contact-us page as the page tracker variable for the goal but wondered if it was counting all form completions AND anyone who went to the contact page. So I amended it to a contact-us/thank-you page that no site visitor could navigate to, and since I have no goals completed, even though we're getting enquiries through the form. Am I being dumb here and missing something quite simple?
Reporting & Analytics | | PerchDigital0 -
Google analytics tracking
Is their a built-in or easy way to track the amount of times an exit link is clicked on a page and show that with other links of the page. For instance: I had a page with several external ad links on it and I want to track how many each got and rank them in google analytics
Reporting & Analytics | | insitegoogle0