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
-
Longterm wordpress blog not providing seo benefit to main site - help needed please
Hi I have a bigcommerce ecommerce store, with a Wordpress blog on a subdomain. The store and blog have been active for four years, the blog is regularly updated with original content, has many links to the store, is promoted regularly via my brand's social media channels and mailing list, and has the simplest SEO basics covered via a Yoast SEO plugin. But the store sees very little, if any, SEO benefit from the blog. My question is: based on this information, and the details below, is there an issue with the connection between the blog and main site in SEO terms? And if there is, how can I start fixing it? Further info: 1 In my Moz dashboard for the store site, the blog does not show at all as providing any inbound links or linking domains 2 Google Analytics also shows zero referral traffic to the store site from the blog since April 2015 3 Moz crawl issues is flagging ‘duplicate page content issues’ for pretty much every page of the blog, and the analysis provided suggests this may be related to tags but I have only basic SEO knowledge and am fast getting out of my depth here. 4 I have today altered the settings within the Yoast plugin on the blog to ‘noindex’ for Tags, Meta Robots, based on advice I have found in this section but am already well over my head and unsure even this is correct. An agency have been running SEO for the store since 2012 but since uncovering how little they have done in this time for the money paid, I am now taking matters back into my own hands. However I am on a very steep learning curve and this one is beyond me right now - please does anyone have any suggestions where I can start looking to uncover the root issue? Any guidance or advice would be greatly appreciated Thanks very much and hope to hear from someone!
Reporting & Analytics | | Warren_331 -
Why might my websites crawl rate....explode?
Hi Mozzers, I have a website with approx 110,000 pages. According to search console, Google will usually crawl, on average, anywhere between 500 - 1500 pages per day. However, lately the crawl rate seems to have increased rather drastically: 9/5/16 - 923
Reporting & Analytics | | Silkstream
9/6/16 - 946
9/7/16 - 848
9/8/16 - 11072
9/9/16 - 50923
9/10/16 - 60389
9/11/16 - 17170
9/12/16 - 79809 I was wondering if anyone could offer any insight into why may be happening and if I should be concerned?
Thanks in advance for all advice.0 -
I have a WP site which uses categories to display the same content in several locations. Which items should get a canonical tag to avoid a ding for duplicate content?
So...I have a Knowledge Center and press room that pretty much use the same posts. So...technically the content looks like its on several pages because the post shows up on the Category listing page. Do I add a Canonical tag to each individual post...so that it is the only one that is counted? Also...I have a LONG disclaimer that goes at the bottom of most of the posts. would this count as duplicate content? Is there a way to markup a single paragraph to tell the spiders not to crawl it?
Reporting & Analytics | | LindsayiHart0 -
Bounce Rate: what is it EXACTLY?
Hi everyone: we all know the term 'Bounce Rate'. I'd like to think i have a good idea of what BR is....but some things are not really clear to me. Time to call in the experts. Question #1: What EXACTLY will stop Google from considering the visit as a bounce? As discussed not too long ago in this topic https://moz.com/community/q/will-this-fix-my-bounce-rate
Reporting & Analytics | | BasKierkels
Ruben wrote: "..what it basically means is that someone clicks on your SERP, and then clicks back to google? But, it doesn't matter if they spent 10 minutes on your page or 10 seconds" Jessica Conflitti wrote a reply in which she basically said that it might be a good idea to have visitors click to a different page OR a PDF-file. That's where my confusion has been for some time now: Clicking on a PDF-document, an image in the page that opens with Fancybox, a link to a different domain? Or can it only be a different URL on the same domain? The way i would expect it to be:
Pages contain the GA-tracking code. So am i right by thinking that Google needs to have the same GA-tracking code to be loaded twice? Because only at that point will they have two datapoints. And only then will they be able to tell that the visitor hasn't left. By clicking a PDF-document - as described by Jessica - you wouldn't load the GA-code twice. So I would expect that clicking a PDF does not make a difference for the BR. Don't get me wrong: i like the article but it is this detail that throws me off. IF Google can read or capture these clicks, what other elements can be used to reduce bounce rate? Clicking on a YouTube-video embedded in the page? I'm asking this because i want to get this right. Question #2: how much weight does BR have on Time on Page, Engagement, etc? We know Google is taking a lot of things into consideration when calculating the value of a URL or domain. So how much should we care for BR if we know the Time on Page is good and a large percentage of people are frequently returning? How about your experiences or knowledge on that? Really looking forward to your replies and help on clearing this topic for me. And perhaps some other readers as well! Bas0 -
How do I find links on my site
I'm looking to find a certain type of link on my site. A link that we're directing out of the site. We have a lot of subdomains though and I was wondering if there was a way to find all the links on each subdomain without screaming frog them all?
Reporting & Analytics | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Can a 100% bounce rate page hurt whole website?
Hello, So with trying to figure out what I can do to better my website, I noticed a post on here that mentioned bounce rates. So I went to my Google analytics pages and listed my bounce rates. My average is 44% But I have a picture page that is 100% and a contact page that is 80% Can pages like this cause an algo penalty that could hurt a whole site? Thank you for your valuable insights
Reporting & Analytics | | Berner0 -
Can 500 errors hurt rankings for an entire site or just the pages with the errors?
I'm working with a site that had over 700 500 errors after a redesign in april. Most of them were fixed in June, but there are still about 200. Can 500 errors affect rankings sitewide, or just the pages with the errors? Thanks for reading!
Reporting & Analytics | | DA20130 -
Identifying conversion rate for product
Hi, I need to identify the conversion rate for a product, lets call it a spanner. I have 100s of spanner product urls and I ensured that the url protocols must include the product name e.g /red_spanner so its easy for me to work out the conversion rate in analytics for all my spanner pages as I just add 'spanner' to the landing page filter, hit the ecommerce tab and bingo. What I cant figure out is how to work out the conversion rate for all spanner sales which includes alot of sales which didnt originate on spanner pages e.g. home page > search result > checkout. Theres 1000s of variations of this e.g. email > home > search > product page > checkout. How can I work out the total conversion rate for spanners which needs to include: people landing on a spanner page and people who didnt arrive at a spanner page and did a search with eventually got them to the spanner pages. Hopefully its not as complicated as I think! Thanks in Advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | AndyMacLean0