
Use Google Analytics on your blog? Check your bounce rate - 6twenty
http://drawingablank.me/blog/fix-your-bounce-rate.html
======
hashtree
There seems to be some misunderstanding in these comments in how Google
Analytics works:

"The Average Time on Page trend line should give you the information you need
without resorting to this." Incorrect, if no further events or pages are
clicked, time on site is ALSO incorrect.

"You'd have to research to make sure that your hack isn't also artificially
inflating the number of pageviews, increasing the pages / visit and
artificially deflating the Avg Visit Duration." This hack is tracking via
events, not pageviews. The last item would be the opposite, it would increase
the average time on site, not decrease it. However, that is another Analytics
issue.

"Firing on timeout is not the ideal way as the general pattern tells us people
open multiple tabs which they may or may not read." This IS true and a valid
way of measuring. Though some might still prefer a time based approach.

This repo <https://github.com/rockymadden/gap> explains most of it.

Lastly, see Google's own word on this (tl;dr it's perfectly valid):
[http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/07/tracking-adjusted-
boun...](http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/07/tracking-adjusted-bounce-rate-
in-google.html)

~~~
thauck
As a person who's done GA implementations and subsequent reporting on around
100 websites this is correct.

On a side note, a tangential GA issue was recently discussed on HN and nearly
everyone had a misunderstanding of how GA worked in that thread too...
sometimes I'm worried that developers will get wise to analytics and I'll be
out of a job, and then I come here and my fears allayed.

The thing is, GA is very simple and it all works together. I'll leave the
below link here, because I think a lot of people could get value from it...

<http://cutroni.com/blog/>

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hu_me
Firing on timeout is not the ideal way as the general pattern tells us people
open multiple tabs which they may or may not read.

A better way is to trigger events based on scroll, that way you can better
tell if there's been actual engagement on the page. I personally use this
jquery based scroll tracking script for GA by Rob.
<http://robflaherty.github.io/jquery-scrolldepth/>

~~~
hispanic
> Firing on timeout is not the ideal way as the general pattern tells us
> people open multiple tabs which they may or may not read.

This is what I was thinking. I do this all the time. However, I have to
question your statement all the same. Yes, this is something I do. But, I'm a
software developer. Assuming that the general population of internet users
follows my personal usage patterns would seem to be a bad idea. Being a web
analyst, are you saying that you've conducted studies verifying this pattern?

Regardless, triggering based on scroll seems like a sounder approach. Thanks
for the pointer.

------
tommi
That's not a fix for bounce rates, it's changing the meaning of bounce rate to
ease your mind.

~~~
awkward
Yup. For this example in particular, 15 seconds is barely enough to read
through the first paragraph, nevermind decide if I want to finish the article.

The writer would be better off treating the bounce rate as an indicator of
users who are engaged enough to hit the archives after reading a post, rather
than juking the stats.

~~~
nmcfarl
But is it juking the stats or adding another stat?

Post fix it seems to me that he has 3 numbers, the number of people who loaded
them page, the number who spent enough time to read the first 'graph, and the
number engaged enough to move into the archives…*

Pre fix, he only had the first and last numbers.

Personally I'd be tempted to use the page visibility API, and a number of
timers, and really track who's reading 1 'graph or 3 or the whole article. But
I sure don't think collecting more data, is juking the stats.

* Although this last number doesn’t seem to be accessible except via your vistor flow page. (Or I couldn’t find it)

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drsim
What's the purpose of getting someone to read your blog post? Rarely is it
just that. You'll want them to share/comment/subscribe/sign up for a
trial/dive into finding out more about your product/buy. Doing these things
will cause them not to bounce.

Fiddling this metric is a fudge.

~~~
onli
I doubt the rarely. Often it is just that. A blog doesn't have to be a direct
marketing tool.

But let's assume that it isn't just about reading the article. Even some your
examples could lead to a bounce:

* Sharing is pressing a button and doing stuff on another server, no activity for GA on this blog -> bounce

* Commenting can also lead to a bounce, if using an Ajax-commenter (think disqus)

* Buying and a trial probably won't be on your blog, but on another system -> bounce. Well, maybe, I admit that this isn't necessary.

~~~
drsim
...so add a GA event to every action that's of value to you:
[https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide)

------
bogrollben
Just my opinion here but I think this is a bad idea. You'd have to research to
make sure that your hack isn't also artificially inflating the number of
pageviews, increasing the pages / visit and artificially deflating the Avg
Visit Duration. By screwing with one metric, you're probably affecting several
others.

Better to just leave it as is and do a better job interpreting the data. If
you run a blog, you're simply going to have a high bounce rate. But as long as
your avg visit time is still high, you can interpret the data in a positive
way and effectively ignore the bounces.

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mtgx
It doesn't make a lot of sense to count bounces when the visitor doesn't click
on another page. The visitor may read the content, by happy with it, and then
leave 2 minutes later. Why is that a "bounce"? I sure hope Google doesn't put
a lot of SEO value on it, if that's the case.

~~~
soemarko
Agreed. I'd imagined a site like Stack Overflow would have a very high bounce
rate.

~~~
chmike
I guess they have their own method to gather statistics instead of depending
on google.

~~~
steveklabnik
Luckily, it's JavaScript, so you can just look at the home page and see if
they are or aren't.

Line 3435 (for me, I'm logged in) holds the answer.

------
rabino
This is a slippery slope. Because you'll end up touching that value until
you're happy with the result. It makes that stat totally useless.

I use different metrics to analyze engagement in blogs (like frequency, time
on page, etc) and use the standard Bounce Rate to measure how likely is for
people to go see more posts, or the "about me" page. If you have a 25% of
people going to check out more of your work or who you are, I think it's a
hell of a good thing, even if that gives you a 75% bounce rate.

------
47
This might work for blogs, But working for an e-commerce startup gave me a
different experience. Conversion flow for our e-commerce site goes something
like this[1]:

Landing Page/Category Browse Page -> Product Page -> Checkout

Typically visitor will go back and forth between product pages and category
browse pages (or simultaneously using multiple tabs). Any visitor not visiting
a Product page is consider a bounce. It does not matter how much visitors
paginate or browse the category pages if they do not visit product page they
will not convert.[2]

I think bounce rate, conversion rate and any other fancy metric you use
depends on your business, website, type of product, target audience, pricing,
etc. As a startup the best thing to do is continuous experimenting untill you
find the right success formula that works for your particular situation.

[1] Yes for e-commerce site with a few or one product this flow does not
apply, Also this is for physical products with longer sale cycle with average
order size between $800 - $1000.

[2] Yes we tried a lot of experiments, including adding direct path from
Browse/Landing Page to Checkout. That particular experiment was a failure as
it created clutter in the browse page and reduce product views and hence the
conversion. I guess some day I will gather my thoughts and write about all the
experiments we did and still doing.

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joe_hoyle
From Wikipedia [1]:

> It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and "bounce"
> (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same
> site.

So.. why are you changing that? If someone comes to your site, reads an
article and leaves, that;s still a bounce :/

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_rate>

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dreen
Can someone tell me what does the bounce rate _affect_?

Also, you should put that code in a function closure rather than calling new
Function():

    
    
        setTimeout(function(){_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', '15_seconds', 'read'])}, 15000);

~~~
ovi256
The bounce rate supposedly affects PageRank. I'm not sure however if this fix
also fixes the bounce rate Google uses internally for calculating PageRank.

~~~
coldtea
> _The bounce rate supposedly affects PageRank._

Huh? Who said that?

AFAIK, PageRank is independent of GoogleAnalytics and does not examine bounce
rate (which it cannot know). PageRank obviously works for the majority of
webpages that do NOT use Google Analytics for example.

~~~
chmike
Yes, but google could still use the statistic information to adjust it's
pageRank. We don't know. Though it would be easier to trick than the reference
counting pageRank algorithm

------
CitizenTekk
I ran an A/B test with Clicky Analytics and the results were astounding. I
have a 70% bounce rate with Google Analytics and a 20% bounce rate with
Clicky.

Word on the street is that Google Analytics is most certainly not designed for
you - the website owner. It's designed for them to track what is useful to
Google, which is why it's free. We all know Google makes bank on our data, so
it's just another way to compile data without offering much service.

I suggest also installing Clicky Analytics and comparing. Would be interesting
to hear results from other people

------
jsdalton
I've been meaning to get around to implement something like this myself. There
are a few other annoyances related to this in Google Analytics the author
doesn't mention, such as Google recording the time of visit for one page
visitors as 0 seconds.

The implementation he describes here is just a 15 second ping. I was thinking
about tying it to a scroll event and sending the ping if the user scrolls down
(maybe a certain distance). This is actually a meaningful event in the context
of a blog (since it likely means they are reading the article).

------
nhebb
The Average Time on Page trend line should give you the information you need
without resorting to this. If you have a call to action or a link to your main
site on the blog, I wouldn't go changing the bounce rate metric.

If you have a product and are advertising on AdWords, you can spend a lot of
time dialing in your ad phrases. With a blog, you have a free test platform
right there! Create a side bar widget that emulates the AdWords look and feel,
and start A/B testing your ad text.

------
calbear81
Also a helpful tip that we learned at our company. Sometimes, we log in
additional information when a user gets to our site to understand things like
load times or to log JS exceptions and such. If you are firing any background
events, those will basically make every visit a "non-bounce" unless you mark
those background events as a "non-interaction" event (boolean: true) to tell
Google to ignore it for bounce rate calculations.

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kevinconroy

      Step 1: Change the way you measure bounce rate
      Step 2: ?
      Step 3: Profit
    

If you follow this article, you need to focus on Step 2.

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kaliblack
A tagging strategy has one purpose: to gather data for a reporting strategy.
Why report on bounce rate where the expected use case is to "bounce" (follow
link in, read, leave)? Surely the aim of blog reporting is to track visitor
trends for overall audience growth/decline and topic popularity.

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Encosia
Some analytics services do this for you automatically. Clicky has been doing
it for for about three years, for example: [http://encosia.com/how-30-seconds-
dropped-my-bounce-rate-by-...](http://encosia.com/how-30-seconds-dropped-my-
bounce-rate-by-78/)

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td21
Good article, also instead of just knowing how many % of people bounced, you
should know WHY the heck they left your site. A nifty tool that I ran into
that helps with it: <http://www.inspectlet.com/>

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6twenty
Posted an update with the new bounce rate (~10%) thanks to a flood of hits
from HN: <http://drawingablank.me/blog/fix-your-bounce-rate.html>

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ErikAugust
Timeout sort of works - though I think adding a scroll down event gives you a
better idea of whether people are reading your material - for the most part
(crazy monitor sizes or short blog posts withstanding).

------
PavlovsCat
Any suggestions for doing the same for Piwik?

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lingben
would the code for google analytics universal (the next gen code) be the same?

thanks!

