How To Interpret Your Bounce Rate In Google Analytics And How To Improve This Information.
What is a “Bounce rate” in Google analytics? To many people who use Google analytics, the “Bounce rate” numbers are a bit of a mystery. What exactly is “Bounce rate” and what information do these numbers provide us?
There are two ways you can look at what a bounce rate tells you.
It is the number, expressed in a percentage of traffic to your website, that either is:
1) a visit to any of your web pages by a person who does not visit any other page.
or
2) a visit to any of your web pages by a person who does not stay longer than 10 seconds.
The trouble with both these definitions is that they are not clear enough. In both cases the information they provide is spectacular but the depth needed to interpret this is sorely lacking.
Indeed both definitions leave us wondering what the visitor to a webpage actually did.
On top of that, we are left to wonder if the visitor to our webpage might have lingered for a longer period than 10 seconds. There are many instances in which this could be the case.
The only certainty we really have is knowing that the surfer has seen only one page and no other.
There is a hack around this and it has the added advantage that you will get better information from Google analytics.
Under this line in your urchin code:
pageTracker._trackPageview();
you add:
setTimeout(‘pageTracker._trackEvent(\’NoBounce\’, \’NoBounce\’, \’Over 10 seconds\’)',10000);
The “10000″ number refers to the number of milliseconds you want to wait before triggering the above code, so if you want it to trigger after 12 seconds, you need to set this number to “12000″.
Now you have set your tracking code to record all visits that last longer than 10 seconds.
This allows you to get the precise number of visits that do not need to be considered as a “bounce” according to definition number two by providing the precise number of visits that really stay less than 10 seconds. It will give you a better insight into visitor engagement.
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