Low bounce rate; need help troubleshooting code
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I've had an outside developer do a bunch of custom work in Google Analytics to get my site to integrate with Foxycart and accurately report sales in the ecommerce section. With a foxycart upgrade came more GA tweaking, and now my bounce rate is at 1-2%. I know this isn't right, and suspecting there is something triggering GA a second time, causing a second page load, or something.
Could someone that loves code look at http://www.strikemodels.com/ and tell me if they can easily spot what's obliterating the accuracy of my bounce rate calculations? Or do I need to go back to my dev and up the can of GA worms to troubleshoot things?
As you can tell by the code, I'm running the latest version of WP with a few plugins, Thesis 1.8, and on Apache.
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Glad it is working correctly now.
If you talk to the developer, they may be able to preload the google stack for your analytics pluging to use. The problem is that the ga.js is getting accessed twice. They should have picked that up the during the development, if they had access to your webserver. I would lean on them to fix this issue. It should be a 10min fix for a js programmer.
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My bounce rate is at 50% this morning, so that must have been it. What I liked about the plugin was that it automatically tagged the external links and pdfs. However, an accurate bounce rate is a more important metric for me.
There's another question in Q&A right now about using an analytics plugin. I'll add my experiences in a comment over there.
Thanks for the help/validation!
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I've deactivated it, and will check back in the morning to see if the data looks better. I think before when I've looked at the code, I was logged in as admin, and the plugin doesn't insert itself when you're admin, so i was seeing just the one set of code.
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When you look at the head section you can see where ga.js is injected twice.
I would say that is what she did. She should have disabled the analytics plugin. You should be able to do that from the admin page without a developer.
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I'm wondering if she put in the async code and didn't realize that it was also in there with the analytics plugin. I'll send her a note in the morning and ask if that might be it. I wanted to do a little figuring out on my own before I started running up her clock and my bill.
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If you visit gtmetrix.com and look at the 'timeline' you will see two javascript calls one to external-tracking-min.js and ga.js both are most likely calling analytics as on a js scanner I see ga.js being called twice.
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