Analytics bounce rate change

[ThomasHgenhaven]

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?

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[DonnaDuncan]

Thank you Keri. Such a speedy response!

And NOW it makes sense. So happy to have that resolved.

[KeriMorgret]

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.

[DonnaDuncan]

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!

[grasshopper]

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.

[ThomasHgenhaven]

Seems like a new post click overlay.

Thanks for the "next page" tip Greg!

[BlueGlass]

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.

[nonlinearcreations]

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?

[A_Q]

Ah! have you seen this?

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Analytics/thread?tid=57d6431b146c86a2&hl=en

[ThomasHgenhaven]

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.

[firstconversion]

Something accidental where you serve two pages? Or have your analytics twice on the page?

[ThomasHgenhaven]

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.

[A_Q]

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?