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!
-
I was just about to reply with check your analytics tools. I had the same issue happen on a WP site, and it was because I had two copies of GA running. Glad you figured it out, but so sorry that wasn't your true bounce rate!
-
Good to hear you worked it out
-
For anyone who else who may be curious, I ended up figuring out what the problem was. We had installed a WordPress plug in to track outbound links from the site so a lot of people that left the site were being recorded as having an event and therefore were not a bounce. When I disabled the plug in our bounce rates went back to normal.
-
I havent done the maths, but yes that sounds about right
-
Our Pages/visit average did also go up by about 2 pages around the same time. Would that be enough to account for a 60% drop in bounce rate??? A 5% bounce rate seems too good to be true.
-
has you Pages/Visit gone up?
if your bounce rate goes down, you would expect Pages/Visit to go up.
-
The low bounce rate is great. If the data is accurate. My concern is that the data is not accurate. We went from about 65% to 5% in 2 days yet we made no changes on the site.
So in other words, if it we had done something to create the dramatic decrease, that would be great. But we did nothing. And given the huge decrease we are left to wonder if there is a problem with the data.
Thoughts?
-
Fix it? A low bounce rate is good. it means 95% of people are visiting more the one page of your site.
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
-
Why few pages have more than 100% bounce rate?
Hello All, For my ecommerce site approx more than 30k products I have. In Google Analytic approx daily for few products approx 10-15 products bounce rate show 300%, 200%, 150%, 140%, 125% how? and what is the solution? Product page daily change. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Johny123450 -
Fixing Bounce Rate between Domain and Subdomain
Currently, the way our site is set up, our clients generally visit our homepage and then login through a separate page that is a subdomain, or they can read our blog/support articles that are also on separate subdomains. From my understanding, this can be counted as a bounce, and I know this sorta of site structure isn't ideal, but with our current dev resources and dependencies, fixing this isn't going to happen overnight. Regardless, what would be the easiest way to implement this fix witihn the Google Analytics code? EX: If someone visits our site at X.com, and then wants to login at portal.X.com, I don't want to count that as a bounce. Any insight is appreciated! Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | KathleenDC0 -
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 -
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 -
Seeing massive spikes in direct traffic with 100% bounce rates
Hi all, Looking through Analytics yesterday, I saw that my website had a huge increase in direct traffic in sessions. However, they apparently spent 0 seconds on the website in total so that raised plenty of red flags. Does anyone have reasons why this might be? Spam or bug? Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Whittie0 -
Does GWT "Fetch as Google Bot" feature affect crawl rate?
Hello Mozians, I have noticed many people saying using GWT fetch as GoogleBot can affect your crawl rate in future, if used regularly. Though, i am not very sure if this is true or just another stale SEO myth. As currently GWT provides a limit of 500 URLs to fetch every month. I hope my doubts will be cleared by the Moz community experts. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | pushkar630 -
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 -
Conversion rates by browser & OS - any feedback/experts/experience?
Hi, Ive been evaluating conversion rates by operating system and by browser for a client. Ive picked up significant and somewhat disturbing trends. As you'd expect the bulk of traffic is coming from a Windows/Internet Explorer combination. This is unfortunately one of the worst combinations (Windows/Firefox & Windows/Safari did worse. Chrome/Windows was significantly the best combination with Windows). Windows also performs much worse than Mac. E.g. Windows/Firefox performs worse than Mac/Firefox. Overall conversion rate for Mac is 7.07% compared to 5.69% Windows. This is based on hundreds of thousands of visits and equates to tens of thousands of dollars difference in revenue. Generally later versions of browsers perform better on both main operating systems e.g IE 9.0 converts at 6.33% compared to 8.0 at 5.80% on Windows and Firefox 4.01 on the Mac converts at 7.57% compared to 3.6.16 at 6.54% (although this dataset is smaller than Windows/IE). Page load speeds (recorded in the clients analytics) are significantly faster on Mac than Windows (as expected really). Being Windows/IE and specifically Windows IE8 represents the bulk of traffic should we be addressing this? Will any optimisation negatively affect better performing Mac/Browser combinations? Understanding that Mac users equate to 'better' converting visitors - what else could be done there? Anyone have thoughts or experience on optimising pages for improved conversion rates via IE and Windows? Thanks in advance, Andy
Reporting & Analytics | | AndyMacLean0