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Use Google Analytics on your blog? Check your bounce rate

by 6twenty on 5/25/13, 10:36 AM with 65 comments

• by hashtree on 5/25/13, 1:08 PM

  There seems to be some misunderstanding in these comments in how Google Analytics works:

  "The Average Time on Page trend line should give you the information you need without resorting to this." Incorrect, if no further events or pages are clicked, time on site is ALSO incorrect.

  "You'd have to research to make sure that your hack isn't also artificially inflating the number of pageviews, increasing the pages / visit and artificially deflating the Avg Visit Duration." This hack is tracking via events, not pageviews. The last item would be the opposite, it would increase the average time on site, not decrease it. However, that is another Analytics issue.

  "Firing on timeout is not the ideal way as the general pattern tells us people open multiple tabs which they may or may not read." This IS true and a valid way of measuring. Though some might still prefer a time based approach.

  This repo https://github.com/rockymadden/gap explains most of it.

  Lastly, see Google's own word on this (tl;dr it's perfectly valid): http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/07/tracking-adjusted-boun...

• by hu_me on 5/25/13, 12:34 PM

  Firing on timeout is not the ideal way as the general pattern tells us people open multiple tabs which they may or may not read.

  A better way is to trigger events based on scroll, that way you can better tell if there's been actual engagement on the page. I personally use this jquery based scroll tracking script for GA by Rob. http://robflaherty.github.io/jquery-scrolldepth/

• by tommi on 5/25/13, 11:40 AM

  That's not a fix for bounce rates, it's changing the meaning of bounce rate to ease your mind.

• by drsim on 5/25/13, 12:17 PM

  What's the purpose of getting someone to read your blog post? Rarely is it just that. You'll want them to share/comment/subscribe/sign up for a trial/dive into finding out more about your product/buy. Doing these things will cause them not to bounce.

  Fiddling this metric is a fudge.

• by bogrollben on 5/25/13, 12:13 PM

  Just my opinion here but I think this is a bad idea. You'd have to research to make sure that your hack isn't also artificially inflating the number of pageviews, increasing the pages / visit and artificially deflating the Avg Visit Duration. By screwing with one metric, you're probably affecting several others.

  Better to just leave it as is and do a better job interpreting the data. If you run a blog, you're simply going to have a high bounce rate. But as long as your avg visit time is still high, you can interpret the data in a positive way and effectively ignore the bounces.

• by mtgx on 5/25/13, 11:46 AM

  It doesn't make a lot of sense to count bounces when the visitor doesn't click on another page. The visitor may read the content, by happy with it, and then leave 2 minutes later. Why is that a "bounce"? I sure hope Google doesn't put a lot of SEO value on it, if that's the case.

• by rabino on 5/25/13, 5:35 PM

  This is a slippery slope. Because you'll end up touching that value until you're happy with the result. It makes that stat totally useless.

  I use different metrics to analyze engagement in blogs (like frequency, time on page, etc) and use the standard Bounce Rate to measure how likely is for people to go see more posts, or the "about me" page. If you have a 25% of people going to check out more of your work or who you are, I think it's a hell of a good thing, even if that gives you a 75% bounce rate.

• by 47 on 5/25/13, 7:59 PM

  This might work for blogs, But working for an e-commerce startup gave me a different experience. Conversion flow for our e-commerce site goes something like this[1]:

  Landing Page/Category Browse Page -> Product Page -> Checkout

  Typically visitor will go back and forth between product pages and category browse pages (or simultaneously using multiple tabs). Any visitor not visiting a Product page is consider a bounce. It does not matter how much visitors paginate or browse the category pages if they do not visit product page they will not convert.[2]

  I think bounce rate, conversion rate and any other fancy metric you use depends on your business, website, type of product, target audience, pricing, etc. As a startup the best thing to do is continuous experimenting untill you find the right success formula that works for your particular situation.

  [1] Yes for e-commerce site with a few or one product this flow does not apply, Also this is for physical products with longer sale cycle with average order size between $800 - $1000.

  [2] Yes we tried a lot of experiments, including adding direct path from Browse/Landing Page to Checkout. That particular experiment was a failure as it created clutter in the browse page and reduce product views and hence the conversion. I guess some day I will gather my thoughts and write about all the experiments we did and still doing.

• by joe_hoyle on 5/25/13, 11:31 PM

  From Wikipedia [1]:

  > It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and "bounce" (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.

  So.. why are you changing that? If someone comes to your site, reads an article and leaves, that;s still a bounce :/

  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_rate

• by dreen on 5/25/13, 11:45 AM

  Can someone tell me what does the bounce rate affect?

  Also, you should put that code in a function closure rather than calling new Function():

      setTimeout(function(){_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', '15_seconds', 'read'])}, 15000);

• by CitizenTekk on 5/25/13, 6:04 PM

  I ran an A/B test with Clicky Analytics and the results were astounding. I have a 70% bounce rate with Google Analytics and a 20% bounce rate with Clicky.

  Word on the street is that Google Analytics is most certainly not designed for you - the website owner. It's designed for them to track what is useful to Google, which is why it's free. We all know Google makes bank on our data, so it's just another way to compile data without offering much service.

  I suggest also installing Clicky Analytics and comparing. Would be interesting to hear results from other people

• by jsdalton on 5/25/13, 12:27 PM

  I've been meaning to get around to implement something like this myself. There are a few other annoyances related to this in Google Analytics the author doesn't mention, such as Google recording the time of visit for one page visitors as 0 seconds.

  The implementation he describes here is just a 15 second ping. I was thinking about tying it to a scroll event and sending the ping if the user scrolls down (maybe a certain distance). This is actually a meaningful event in the context of a blog (since it likely means they are reading the article).

• by nhebb on 5/25/13, 12:49 PM

  The Average Time on Page trend line should give you the information you need without resorting to this. If you have a call to action or a link to your main site on the blog, I wouldn't go changing the bounce rate metric.

  If you have a product and are advertising on AdWords, you can spend a lot of time dialing in your ad phrases. With a blog, you have a free test platform right there! Create a side bar widget that emulates the AdWords look and feel, and start A/B testing your ad text.

• by calbear81 on 5/26/13, 5:20 AM

  Also a helpful tip that we learned at our company. Sometimes, we log in additional information when a user gets to our site to understand things like load times or to log JS exceptions and such. If you are firing any background events, those will basically make every visit a "non-bounce" unless you mark those background events as a "non-interaction" event (boolean: true) to tell Google to ignore it for bounce rate calculations.

• by kevinconroy on 5/25/13, 12:20 PM

    Step 1: Change the way you measure bounce rate
    Step 2: ?
    Step 3: Profit
  

  If you follow this article, you need to focus on Step 2.

• by kaliblack on 5/25/13, 1:31 PM

  A tagging strategy has one purpose: to gather data for a reporting strategy. Why report on bounce rate where the expected use case is to "bounce" (follow link in, read, leave)? Surely the aim of blog reporting is to track visitor trends for overall audience growth/decline and topic popularity.

• by Encosia on 5/25/13, 1:35 PM

  Some analytics services do this for you automatically. Clicky has been doing it for for about three years, for example: http://encosia.com/how-30-seconds-dropped-my-bounce-rate-by-...

• by td21 on 5/26/13, 4:18 AM

  Good article, also instead of just knowing how many % of people bounced, you should know WHY the heck they left your site. A nifty tool that I ran into that helps with it: http://www.inspectlet.com/

• by 6twenty on 5/25/13, 7:16 PM

  Posted an update with the new bounce rate (~10%) thanks to a flood of hits from HN: http://drawingablank.me/blog/fix-your-bounce-rate.html

• by ErikAugust on 5/25/13, 8:02 PM

  Timeout sort of works - though I think adding a scroll down event gives you a better idea of whether people are reading your material - for the most part (crazy monitor sizes or short blog posts withstanding).

• by PavlovsCat on 5/25/13, 9:20 PM

  Any suggestions for doing the same for Piwik?

• by lingben on 5/25/13, 3:43 PM

  would the code for google analytics universal (the next gen code) be the same?

  thanks!