

Fix Your Inaccurate Google Analytics Bounce Rate and Time on Site - samcollins
http://mindtheproduct.com/2011/08/data-driven-your-bounce-rate-and-time-on-site-are-wrong/

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corin_
In my experience, time on site isn't going to be a useful metric however you
go about it. At least with the news sites my company runs, checking if a page
is still open would be hopeless because it's very common for users to just
open the 2, 5, 20 pages they want to read in different tabs, then work through
them slowly. And for clicking outbound links, well nearly all exits for us are
window/tab closing, not links elsewhere.

Maybe this isn't so much the case for other industries, or even for the same
type of site targeting a less techy audience? (e.g. My mother wouldn't ever
open multiple tabs as a queue of pages - but then, she might well open a page
and then go do some cooking, or whatever, before reading it.)

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theblueadept111
If google is using bounce rate as a signal for page ranking, this advice is
very useful for people who have a low bounce rate simply because all the
information is on a single page, or because the page uses dynamic html to
refresh the content as the user digs deeper into the app.

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AlexC04
neat. I wish I had a bit more time to play with your TOS gist. Unfortunately,
I just skipped my morning workout to get what I got in the comment there, and
now have to run off to work. (boo)

Oh well... that's why they call it a gist right? :) I think focus and blur
events on the document or window are key to getting "perfect" TOS. Just have
to think about how to make it most efficient ... I prefer doing away with the
timer and just sending the data once in the UNLOAD event.

There's peril to that (browser crashes?) and maybe the 10 second 'tick' is
better.

Dunno. I really have to go now. Breakfast! Starving.

~~~
samcollins
Yeah the timer is a bit crude, working on a better script which considers an
interaction as a click, scroll, or keydown and sends minimal events to GA.

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yaix
I always supposed that G was doing that anyway. Why would they measure time-
on-site only per page load?

Has anybody implemented this and seen a jump in their time-on-site and bounce
rate values?

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mildweed
Another way to do this is to trigger the tracking with the
window.onbeforeunload event paired with logic that makes sure the user has
actually been on page for longer than X seconds/minutes.

