Bounce Rate
-
Howdy Mozzers
Does anyone know if the 'average time on site' in Google analytics is calculated with bounce rate included?
For example if you have a 50% bounce rate and your average time on site is 2 minutes the actual time would be 4 minutes as the 50% bounce rate time is classed as 0.
I hope that is clear!
Cheers
-
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a certain page or site who only visited one page and then left the site. It's not related to the amount of time spent on a site. The amount of time spent on a site is the average time overall for time spent on the site before leaving. Hope that helps.
-
Going back a step, "Average Time On Site' in my opinion, is not a relevant statistic any more as internet connection speed increases.
With dial up connection the customer paid per minute on-line. Now with flat rates for broadband people leave pages open when they step away from their computers - I've had pages open at the office literally for days! That would really muck up anyone's stats. (That's not why I do it though)
-
There is an easy way to fix this. Create a custom advanced segment to only include visits with pageviews > 1. This will allow you to see avg time on site for all visitors excluding bounces.
-
I think it could massively confuse things if they didn't take it into account. Should those page views be deleted as well then? Do they not count as unique visitors or visitors at all?
Don;t get me wrong, I see where you are coming from, but the completely objective data is what makes GA so valuable.
-
It's a shame Google are counting this. I see their reasons though I believe. Bounces did originally want to view your site, so they are a visitor in theory. It does skew the data massively however
-
Yep good answer cheers.
Conclusion - Totally inaccurate!
-
-
There is some great info about this on this link: https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=7f1a0537ed9f8fe8&hl=en
Rather than me paraphrasing and messing it up or copying/plagiarizing their answer, I'll just point you in the right direction.
-
Can you provide a link to the horses mouth?
-
Average time on site includes bounces (counted as 0 seconds) in the calculations.
See http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/01/standard-metrics-revisited-time-on-page-and-time-on-site.html
-
Agreed! Very misleading and inaccurate if it is included.
-
Haha don't worry your safe...for now!
Like all thing its should be used as a relative measure but it can be quite misleading especially for an obsessed client who doesn't know the real meaning of bounce rate, hence the reason for my question so I can explain it but the time on site is also misleading if the bounce rate is included.
-
I'm pretty sure that bounced traffic isn't calculated in the average time on site, Analytics put 0 because it can't calculate the time on site unless a visitor hit a second page within the same Analytics code (site). I'm not 100% sure but that would be really irrelevant to include bounced traffic to this metric.
-
Yeah, I'm assuming that from Googles view of analytics is post search, thus time after search...
I might be completely wrong (don't sue, kill or hurt me!), however I couldn't find a better answer from a more reputable source!
-
Hmm I guess it could be clearer and be labelled as 'avg. time on site' rather than 'time after search' which I assume your referring to?
-
I've always believed that the time on site is a global average of all visitors. Never thought to question myself until now though. Aran seems to have found the answer. Thanks
-
Hi, your question led me on an interesting trip though Google help, revisiting the basics of analytics.
Google define the Bounce Rate as:
"Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page" - Google Webmaster Help http://bit.ly/gPPNPj - This makes me think of single page sites, do they have 100% bounce rate?
Heres a look at how Google Analytics performs it calculations. http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=77234
What I took from this is that all visitor times are taken and averaged, bounce or not.
Cheers
Aran
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
-
*Dramatic* reduction in bounce rate, why?
Hi all I cannot pin this down to one of -new theme using Thesis 2 and Social Triggers, or -implementing Moz Does the Moz crawler linger on page? I'd love to know why this is happening 7iSnNfC
Reporting & Analytics | | TimMarsh0 -
Irrelevant page with high bounce rate
I have a page on my site, www.waikoloavacationrentals.com/kolea-rentals/floor-plans, that gets me roughly 17% of my traffic. That being said it is not really relevant traffic because it comes from the search term "floor plans", which really has nothing to do with Hawaii vacation rentals, which is what I do. My question is does Google know how to figure that out when they are looking at my stats or is there a way to let google know that that page probably should not show up for that search phrase? On the positive, they are nice floor plans and if someone is searching for ideas for floor plans and see one of them in google images then it probably could help them, but it really is not relevant to my business. It has a 80% bounce rate, but does have an average time on page of 1.5 minutes, which is a fair amount for what is there.
Reporting & Analytics | | RobDalton0 -
100% Bounce Rate in my Checkout??
I am currently building a report on our bounce rates for the past few years. When I look at older data, from 2010-11 I see varying bounce rates for the checkout, which is fine. When I move to new data, 2011-12 and 2012-13 I am seeing 100% bounce rates and exit rates for my checkout. We do use a 3rd party for our checkout, Shopatron and yes we do have it set up to track. Any thoughts on why I might be seeing this high rate for my bounce rate oh and this also goes for my exit percentage as well.
Reporting & Analytics | | K2_Sports0 -
Open internal links in a new tab increase bonus rate?
Hello! This week I used a simple method to reduce my blog Google Analytics bounce rate. My blog all the posts are guides, in order to follow them, user need to download a zip file (same zip file). Otherwise they can't. Therefore I added a separate blog post to download all the necessary files. As a result of that I can reduce my bounce rate from 62-70% to 45-50% level. Now I'm thinking to open that zip file download page in a new tab. If I open my blog zip file download page, in a new tab. It will again increase my bounce rate? I reduced my bounce rate using that zip file download page. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Godad0 -
Bounce rates plummeted
In Google Analytics, my average bounce rates plummeted basically overnight. I went from a consistent average daily bounce rate of about 65% to an average daily bounce rate near 5%. My average number of visitors has stayed the same. I don't think there is any significant change I made to my site that may have caused this. Has anyone else had the same problem and know why it happened and how to fix it? Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Ericc220 -
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 -
Organic bounce rate after site re-launch
3 months ago a client of mine re-launched theoir web site (after having a lot of work done on it). Since then, many of the SEO indications are good - more non-paid keywords sending search visits, more organic visits overall, more URLs receiving entrances via search, etc. The issue is that their bounce rate has been increasing pretty much EVERY week since. Has anyone seen a similar issue and what could a potential solution be for this? Thanks everyone!
Reporting & Analytics | | CathalOMaoilfhinn0 -
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.
Reporting & Analytics | | KeriMorgret0