Low bounce rate; need help troubleshooting code
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Tracking Product Codes
Hey Mozzers, We are improving our B2B site by adding product codes to headings & meta information etc to gain some traction ranking for our own products and those supplied by others when searched for by product code. Almost immediately we are hitting the top half of the first page for most of these and seeing some nice results. We would like to track our placement for these product codes in google but feel this would be a waste of our Moz Keyword limit and we really dont need to check them once a week, just one a month or so. Has anybody got any methods of tracking our ranking for a a big list of keywords say once a month which isn't too labour intensive? Many Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ATP0 -
Google Analytics Stopped Tracking Visits - NEED HELP!
Hi Moz Community, I have about 10 sites, static HTML sites and WordPress sites, which ALL stopped tracking Google Analytics on August 2nd. They go to a flat-line! Dead! No data! Has anyone else experienced this either currently or before? I have confirmed all code is correct as it's been tracking these sites for years. One site gets 5,000+ visits a month and they are sitting at only 1,500 now and will be a fun conversation to have with the client. If all code is correct, what should I do? How do I overcome this without having to re-create another account/tracking ID? Never dealt with something like this before and there is not much on the web or in other forums. Would appreciate any help or advice or tips! - Patrick
Reporting & Analytics | | WhiteboardCreations0 -
Best to Leave Toxic Links or Remove/Disovow on Site with Low Number of Linking Domains
Our site has only 87 referring domains (with at least 7,100 incoming links). LinkDetox has identified 29% of our back links as being toxic and 14% as being questionable. Virtually all of these links derive from spammy sites. We never received a manual penalty, but ever since the first Penguin penalty in 2012 our search volume and ranking has dropped with some uneven recover in the last 3 years. By removing/disavowing toxic links are we risking that over optimized link text will be removed and that ranking will suffer as a result? Are we potentially shooting ourselves in the foot? Would we be better to spend a few months building quality links from reputable domains before removing disavowing bad links? Or toxic links (as defined by LinkDetox) so bad that it should be a priority to remove them immediately before taking any other step? Thanks, Alan
Reporting & Analytics | | Kingalan10 -
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 -
Has GA changed how it calculates bounce rate?
Updated website from Magento backend to Wordpress and since the redeploy, my bounce rate has dropped from 40% to 4%. I did check to see if there was duplicate GA tracking code but only one call. I checked reports under "visitor flow" and one page visits seem inline with the previous bounce rate. Weird. Never experienced this before.
Reporting & Analytics | | Timmmmy0 -
Can you help me figure out what happened to my website search results in Google?
On or about the 24th of April I noticed an abrupt decrease in traffic to my website:
Reporting & Analytics | | rdominey
http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com Sorry this might be long but I’m trying to be as thorough as possible. I thought that I had been hacked, a virus, maybe penalized by Google I don’t know what ? I submitted a reconsideration request to Google and they responded with the following: Reconsideration request for http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/: No manual spam actions found
May 10, 2012
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. - - - - - -
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Google Search Quality Team I have ran all kinds of web crawl tests, Google webmaster, talked with SEO “Experts” and still can not figure out what is happening. I decided to use a couple of SEOmoz tools to try to help me explain what is happening. I figured that if I could take a very specific and unique KeyPhrase and run it on a specific page that I might be able to better explain what is happening. Basically, We appear to be no longer searchable by key words or phrases on google?
Here is an example:
Key Phrase: Free Services to Help Improve Your Photos on Canvas
Website: http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/free-photo-canvas-retouching
Attached are some screen shots of the actual search results on Bing, Yahoo and Google along with the ranking tool results from SEOmoz and the on page grade for the key phrase.
Anybody got any Ideas? I am hurting; the internet and Google search is about 40% of by business. http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Bing-Free-Services.jpg http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Yahoo-Free-Services.jpg http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Google-Free-Services.jpg http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/SEOmoz-Ranking.jpg http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/SEOmoz-Report-Card.jpg [" target="_blank">iframe>](<iframe class=) Bing-Free-Services.jpg Yahoo-Free-Services.jpg Google-Free-Services.jpg SEOmoz-Ranking.jpg SEOmoz-Report-Card.jpg0 -
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 -
Analytics goals & funnels - troubleshooting 100% proceed to next step
As you can see from the screenshots, 100% of the visitors in the checkout proceed from step 2 (Delivery Date Selected) to step 3 (Enter Delivery Details) - this sample is a month, but this applies going all the way back. Can you tell me if some RegEx is missing from the goal set up? Thanks fEXtD
Reporting & Analytics | | jdeb1