Strange bounce rate trending
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what would make it jump up/down so suddenly like that?
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Could there ever have been a promotion or popup or redirect to another page that would have registered as a second page view and thus killed the bounce rate? Was GA tracking external clicks for some of that?
I'd go into GA and select one of the time frames where the bounce rate increased or dropped off, then start looking at other things. Was there a page that had a bunch of views then dropped off? Look at any clues of things that might have the same trend and help explain what happened.
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Agree, possible there are duplicate GA scripts on part of pages.
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Nope, never PPC. and no, the site hasn't really changed at all. it is a chat forum, phpbb install, and exact same theme that whole time.
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I had something very similar happen, and in my case the part with very little bounce rate was where I had two GA scripts on my site at the same time without realizing it. It's a Wordpress site, and I had both a GA plugin installed and custom GA code to track ecommerce sales across a different domain.
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Thats a 2 year time period you posted, has the site design or structure changed over that time? If so thats most likely the issue. Also, was there any period of time you were running PPC in that timespan?
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