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
-
Seeing massive spikes in direct traffic with 100% bounce rates
Hi all, Looking through Analytics yesterday, I saw that my website had a huge increase in direct traffic in sessions. However, they apparently spent 0 seconds on the website in total so that raised plenty of red flags. Does anyone have reasons why this might be? Spam or bug? Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Whittie0 -
Steady Decline in Domain Authority since December 2014
We have a site that was at a 32 domain authority in December, and our competition as usually been about a point or two behind us. But since December, we have fallen a point or two after each index and are now at the point of 26 and our competition is up to a 33. The competition did fall a point or two but were able to regain what they lost. We publish original content blogs over 600 words per blog targeted at our audience twice a week and post to all of our social media channels and have guest blogged linking back to our site. We also updated the look of our site to be mobile responsive to comply with Google's mobile indexing. I did find some spam feed burners linking to our site over 4,000 times and have since disavowed those links. Has anyone experienced a decline in domain authority in the past few months and have you been able to turn it back around? Is there something that we should look at fixing or something we are missing that could help bring our numbers back up?
Reporting & Analytics | | T-wrench0 -
How Google measure website bounce rate ?
Bounce rate is a SEO signal, but how Google measures it ? There is any explanation about this ? Does Google uses Analytics ? Maybe time between 2 clics in search results ? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Max840 -
Homepage on page 2 for site:domain
Hi all, today I noticed that our homepage is located on page 2 if you do the site:domain query. As far as I know, the site:domain results mirror the importance in the eyes of Google. Some time ago, our homepage was the first result. I have to say that we do not often have changing elements or new content on the homepage, it is more like a static page. But still the most linked to page on the domain... What conclusion can I come to? Is our homepage of lower importance to Google than some time ago? Is it a problem for SEO? As we backed down our advertisments, the traffic from branded keywords fell the last months - could this be an explanation? And, most important: do I have to worry? (Besides, the SEO-traffic is fine and growing..)
Reporting & Analytics | | accessKellyOCG0 -
If I am changing my domain for my website and want to keep using the same Google Analytics account to keep the data from the old domain. How should I proceed?
If I am changing my domain for my website and want to keep using the same Google Analytics account to keep the data from the old domain. How should I proceed? Do I have to start a new Google Analytics account for the new domain? If so how do I keep the old data? Or can I use the same GA account? Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | brianhughes1 -
Multiple Domain Tracking with One Google Analytics Account
I am working on multiple online retail stores as follow. Right now, I have tracking facility with multiple account. Attached image can give you more idea about it. http://www.vistastores.com/
Reporting & Analytics | | CommercePundit
http://www.lampslightingandmore.com/
http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/ I don't want to track my statistics with multiple account. Because, it may take too much time behind Goal set up as well as analysis. Can I track all data under one account for all online retail stores? 6464019053_bda32e9fe0_b.jpg0 -
Yahoo Site explorer: Different results for www & non-www domain. Can we merge these?
When checking our domain on yahoo site explorer, different results are shown for www.theprintspace.de and theprintspace.de. We have done a 301 redirect, as we want to optimise our www.theprintspace.de domain. However, we have a lot more backlinks for theprintspace.de. Is there any way of merging the two, so we don't loose all the linkjuice we get for theprintspace.de and use those links to optimise www.theprintspace.de? Thanks for your help!
Reporting & Analytics | | Waplington0 -
Tracking 301'd Domains
'ello SEOMozers 🙂 I've been implementing some awesomely search engine friendly 301'd domains for clients and they work great but I seem to have missed the point where I track said domains in some fashion and come here to ask the question --> how are you all tracking refers from 301'd domains that are pointed to your main hubs? Currently our practice in-house is to alias them in our servers then use .htaccess rules to 301 them to the 1 domain to-rule-them-all but Google Analytics doesn't recognize them as different domains with that plan of action and there goes my refer tracking. Is there a super-star way to use the Google URL Builder and combine that with the above plan of action or a better plan? Has anyone else implemented something else more awesome-er that could help a girl out? Much thanks and Happy Thursday!
Reporting & Analytics | | treefrogseo0
