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Improved bounce error

Discussion in 'Better Analytics' started by adamoxford, Jun 29, 2016.

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  1. #1
    Hi folks,

    First of all, great plugin. We've been testing and looking at going premium, but have run into an odd bug I hope you can help with. I activated the Improved Bounce Rate flag in the settings, but it returned a rate that was way too low to be believable (single digit percentages for a fairly large news site).

    The problem is that I can't turn it off. Turning it off in settings doesn't seem to do anything - we're still reporting an unreasonably low bounce rate.

    Any idea how I can fix this manually and where the flag may be stuck?

    Best

    Adam

    (site is htxt.co.za if you want to look)
     
    adamoxford, Jun 29, 2016 IP
  2. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #2
    Are you 100% certain it's off? It's the "User Engagement" event checkbox.

    As far as why it's so low it would be because an "Adjusted Bounce Rate" might be more useful normally (since it's measuring someone on your site even if they only view one page), a more traditional Bounce Rate will consider a user "bounced" even if they spend 30 minutes reading an article on your site simply because they didn't go to a different page. You can find more info about it here: https://analytics.googleblog.com/2012/07/tracking-adjusted-bounce-rate-in-google.html
     
    digitalpoint, Jun 29, 2016 IP
  3. adamoxford

    adamoxford Peon

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    #3
    100% certain in the admin panel at least. Tried turning it on, saving, turning it off saving etc.

    I understand how Adjusted Bounce Rate works and why we should be using it, but our bounce rate dropped from >80% to <10%, and none of the other analytics suggests that's the case. While I would love it to be so, there's not a news site in the world that can boast that. Somehow the flag is recording adjusted bounce for traffic including <10seconds I think.

    To put it another way, even if it were true that our adjusted bounce was <10%, none of our advertisers would believe it so we couldn't use it anyway :)
     
    adamoxford, Jun 29, 2016 IP
  4. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #4
    It looks to me like you are tracking AJAX events... and you are automatically forcing the user to trigger an AJAX event on the home page. So you are logging 2 actions by the user... the pageview, and then the AJAX event. Since Google Analytics is seeing a second action from the user automatically you are going to have a very low "bounce rate" if you are measuring bounce rates as the user only doing 1 action. You might want to disable the AJAX event tracking and see how it looks.
     
    digitalpoint, Jun 29, 2016 IP
  5. adamoxford

    adamoxford Peon

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    #5
    That sounds promising. So it's the setting in Monitoring>Debugging Events>AJAX Events? Will switch it off and keep an eye on it and let you know how we get on.

    Thanks for the quick responses BTW.
     
    adamoxford, Jun 29, 2016 IP
  6. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #6
    Yep... that's my best guess just by having a quick look at the main page.
     
    digitalpoint, Jun 29, 2016 IP
  7. adamoxford

    adamoxford Peon

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    #7
    It's looking very promising - will give it a few days and then try the adjusted bounce rate again.
     
    adamoxford, Jun 29, 2016 IP
    digitalpoint likes this.
  8. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #8
    Well the adjusted bounce rate is going to dramatically lower your bounce rate, so if you are looking to *not* have that happen, you probably don't want to. If your site is a site that users tend to stay on the site and read whatever page it is they entered the site on, it's going to change dramatically, because adjusted bounce rate is a measurement of someone staying on the site for a minimum of xx seconds (not a measurement of how many pages they viewed).
     
    digitalpoint, Jun 29, 2016 IP