High bounce rates consistent with a login that takes you to a 3rd party site?
-
My firm has a credit union client whose bounce rates skyrocketed after implementing an online banking portal. Logging in to the online banking portal takes you to a 3rd party site. Would arriving at the site and immediately logging in be considered a bounce? And if so, would a high bounce rate actually correlate with a warm reception to their online banking tool?
-
Paul,
Let me just say thank you for a thoroughly informed and thoughtfully written response. It gives me everything I need to guide my client. Really appreciate you taking the time.
-
The technical definition of a bounce in Google Analytics is that the visitor arrived at the page and triggered a hit to the Analytics tracking code and then left the page without triggering any further interactive hits to the tracking. That's exactly what's happening when a visitor comes to the primary site's page, then leaves it to go on to the new 3rd-party page that doesn't contain the same tracking code.
The critical question here then is "would a high bounce rate actually correlate with a warm reception to their online banking tool?" Unfortunately, in GA's default tracking mode, there's no way to know definitively whether a visitor bounced because they didn't get what they wanted and left, or if they got exactly what they wanted and went on to the online banking tool. And ideally, we want more than just correlation, we'd like reliable data. Knowing the difference between these two site behaviours gives us the critical understanding of whether those bounces are happy visitors or not. The solution is going to require some enhancement of the default tracking.
Fortunately, once you understand that definition of a bounce above, the possible solutions to your challenge become more clear.
The ideal solution would be that the 3rd-party site has a system to allow you to add your own site's Google Analytics tracking code to your pages on their site. You could then set up cross-domain tracking, and your GA would then fire again on the 3rd-party site visit so you'd know for certain they got there and you'd be able to report on the users' behaviour as they went from your site to the other one and back again. Many of the better 3rd-party tools offer this if you check, as it's a common need.
If that's not possible, we still need to understand the behaviour of the visitor during the course of the bounced visit on the primary site. The way we discover and track user behaviour within a page (as opposed to when moving from page to page) is by adding Event tracking to the actions a user might take that are valuable or of interest to us. In this case, we can add event tracking to the link click that takes the visitor off to the 3rd-party site. That way, we'll know that for every bounce visit that also had that click event associated with it, we had a "warm reception", rather than an annoyed "I came, I puked, I left" visitor (to quote Analytics expert Avinash Kaushik).
And in the definition we have another clue - if a bounce is a visit with only one hit to the tracking code, we can decide that a successful one-page visit shouldn't be counted as a bounce. To do that, we can specify that the event tracking click should be classified as interactive and count as another hit to the tracking code. This means single pageviews with such clicks will no longer be counted as bounces. This is just a semantics change - we will already be able to tell in the GA reports that the event occurred. But if the data model for the site is that bounces are bad, this will make the data more properly reflect that this bounce visit shouldn't be counted as bad.
Final note - if you're not able to get your own tracking added to the 3rd-party site, you're going to need to add that site to the primary site's Referral Exclusion list. This way, if/when a visitor comes back to the main site from the online banking tool, they'll essentially "pick up from where they left off" in their original tracking, instead of just being (artificially) counted as a whole new session with a referrer as the banking tool site, which would badly skew the accuracy of your data.
Hope that all makes sense?
Paul
[Sidenote: This is why average bounce rate for a site is a totally worthless metric. Some pages are actually most successful if they are bounces - i.e. the visitor got exactly what they wanted in a single pageview. Bounce must always be segmented by page (and even by location/mobile/desktop etc) to avoid incorrect assumptions. And if you add behavioural understanding through event tracking, you can get a much fuller picture of what's actually happening during those bounces and where optimization is needed.]
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
-
How is this site being tracked in GA?
Hi, Bit of an unusual one this, so please bear with me. This site http://www.hayesandhurst.com/ is being tracked in Google Analytics but we're unsure as to how. To the best of our knowledge we haven't inserted the tracking ID into the theme options or the tracking code into the source - and yet it appears to be tracking successfully! I did send some instructions to the client to set up the Analytics account in their name - I fear they have added the code somewhere to the site, but we cannot see where! Perhaps via Google tag Manager?? As I say, an odd one this, but if anyone can shed any light on this mystery i'd be hugely grateful. The tracking ID is UA-64505394-1 for the record. Regards,
Reporting & Analytics | | nathangdavidson
Nathan0 -
Tracking Clicks on a Global Header Across Multiple Sites
Hey All, A particular client has multiple websites and we're planning on implementing a global header across 15+ sites. I've been looking for a way to track the clicks on this global header across all sites (that is that they are summed up), what's the best way to go about this if I am using Google Analytics (I know Adobe site catalyst could do this no problem with some advanced tweaking), any ideas? I could do the general click tracking route and tag every link but that will only help me if I do that for each site (that being said, if the global header for all sites pulls from a single HTML, then tagging it would technically count all the clicks from all the sites, the only caveat being that I'd have to pick which Google analytics profile I'd want to track the header with). Thoughts? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | EvansHunt0 -
How can you tell if Google has already assessed a penalty against your site for spammy links?
Is there any way to tell for sure if there is a penalty? My client has a ton of low quality back links, and I think they are in danger of a Penguin penalty. Any way to know? The links are there for a business reason.... their clients mention them in the footer, with a backlink. It is not a link scheme. but folks are generally not clicking on a footer link, and so there is a pro/con of leaving it as it. Any way, to diagnose whether a Penguin penalty has already hit?
Reporting & Analytics | | DianeDP2 -
Reach local driving up bounce rate...
Hi all! I have a new client that I did a website for. After a month, looking at the analytics, it shows that while the site visits from reach local is more than the organic google, the reachlocal traffic is bouncing, causing the overall website bounce rate to skyrocket. Organic bounce rate is 47.62% and the reachlocal is at 84.25% driving the overall bounce rate to 68! Duration of the reachlocal traffic is at :56 vs 3:41 for organic. (SEE ATTACHED IMAGE) I'm guessing this all means that the reachlocal traffic is obviously not quality, so does that mean they are targeting non-relevant keywords? I don't have any experience dealing with reachlocal. Should I recommend my client to drop it? And if so, how to stop that traffic from coming to the site? I'm sure this is an easy one for you pros! Thanks! ~BB MUW959h.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | BBuck0 -
Bounce rate consistently dropping
We started using SEO MOZ campaigns and crawl diagnostics for our site in November 2011. At that time, our bounce rate was 57.58%. From there, it has consistently dropped. Dec. 57% Jan. 24.86% Feb. 14.61% March 17.48 % April 12.35% We started out with 1,000's of errors showing up in the crawl diagnostics, down to under 50. could this be associated with the bounce rate drop?
Reporting & Analytics | | Stevej240 -
Embed elements on my page help decrease my bounce rate?
I've embed elements on my page (vídeos, presentations) and i was wondering if when someone uses them it counts for the bounce rate. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | lnjaine0 -
If a site has 301 redirect - Will the Analytics of the target site show it as a referral or as the traffic source it came from?
Lets say I have a site www.abc.com and I rederect that site to www.xyz.com. If ABC.com is still ranking for keyword X and orgnically someone searches for X and they click on the ABC.com listing - In the XYZ site analytics (which is the target site) does it show as organic or referall, direct? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | M_80 -
For an optimized site, any available stats / guesstimates on what is avg % of traffic to homepage vs. second-level pages?
I'm interested in passing this info on to a client who experienced a period of time when an incorrect GA code was installed on their homepage. They were able to get Google stats on second level pages only. This is a site that gets 80 + % of visits from organic search engine referrals. They do minimal advertising. Thanks in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | alankoen1230