What happened on the 14th of February?
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Hi guys,
Something super weird happened. The bouncerate of one of my clients has been around 20% for over a year now, with steady traffic.
On the 14th of February, the bouncerate trippled to 60%. The traffic is still as usual, and the bouncerate did not increase for one specific channel, it just trippled overall.
Pages that used to have nearly 0% bounces now have almost 80%, these pages are super relevant for the users. I am worried that something happened, that happened offsite. Because we did not make any changes to the site the last month.
Do you have any suggestions? It is super weird.
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Your pageviews might also be different now too. This happened to me, when I had a WP site and I had both a plugin for Google Analytics and had put the GA code in manually. I had real low bounce rates, and twice the pageviews I should have.
Be sure to make an annotation in GA to explain what happened, so someone else looking at the account knows, or two years from now it can remind you of what happened.
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It had something to do with the way the cookies were set up. Apparently the bouncerate is natural now, it used to be influenced by a weird javascript/cookie string.
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If you are on a shared server maybe another site or sites on it saw a big jump in Valentine's Day traffic and that affected your site also. Check page loading times for anything odd, maybe your site was loading abnormally slowly?
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Failing all else, post this on the Webmaster Forums to see if they can shed any light on it.
-Andy
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Yes that is the weird thing. Nothing happened to the site (at least from what I know now).
I am doing browser tests and other tests at the moment, no results. It is one of the weirder things that I have encountered so far.
Valentines day has nothing to do with it, because the bouncerate is still the same....
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It is a bit of an add one this because an algorithm update is unlikely to affect bounce rates on a website.
Is your client feeling the effects of the bounce rate? Have conversions gone down at all? The only thing that has happened in February was the update from Google and their Page Layout algorithm, but I can't see how this would affect the bounce rate at all.
-Andy
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Valentines day? It could be that you had some pretty targeted traffic on a couple of keywords and that they didn't found what they were looking for on your site? Because of not provided it will be hard to figure out what kind of keyword it was though ;-).
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