Bounce Rate Question - The percent calculated does not add up
-
Hello All,
I'm attempting to see why organic search bounce rate has increased by 5% when compared to last year for a certain section of my website. I am using a custom segment to filter the specific pages I want to look at. Once the custom segment is set, I go to Acquisition - > Channels - > Organic. Then, I click the Landing Pages tab. Because we don't have keyword data anymore the only thing I can look at is the landing pages that contributed to the change in bounce. Finally, I set my date range and compare to the same date range as last year. Once I set the date range I am presented with a list of URLs and the percent change in bounce rate for each URL. This is where I get confused. If you look at the average bounce rate at the top of the column (example 1 attached) it does not add up with the data below it. If you export all of the data to excel, and then do an "Average" function in Excel, the data adds up to 17.29% instead of 35.04% for Sept. 2013. Why does this not add up? Isn't GA calculating the Average?
Also, I always notice several URLs with only 1 session per URL. Several of these 1 session URLs have a 100% bounce rate. Since the bounce rate at the top of the column (example1) is a reflection of the average bounce rate, wouldn't these 1 session URLs significantly distort my data?
I ultimately just want to see the pages that are contributing to the increased bounce rate when compared to last year. Having a hard time figuring this one out.
Thank you all,
Dave
-
Andy, Thank you so much. I had a feeling I was making this out to be something much harder than it actually was. Of course you can't average percentages. That explains everything. Thank you!
-
If I am reading the question correctly, then its more of a maths questions rather than an SEO question.
You simply can't average % as some figures have more weighting than others, pages with more page views will have a higher weighting to the total average %, than the pages with 1 page view and 100% bounce rate. So simply using the average formula in Excel wouldn't take into account the weighting and assume they all have equal weighting (which unless ever page had the exact same number of page views, isn't the case).
Here is probably a better explanation: http://www.ehow.co.uk/how_6437936_calculate-averages-percentages.html
Hope this is useful.
Thanks
Andy
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
-
Should I use sessions or unique visitors to work out my ecommerce conversion rate?
Hi all First question here but I've been lingering in the shadows for a while. As part of my companies digital marketing plan for the next financial year we are looking at benchmarking against certain KPIs. At the moment I simply report our conversion rate as Google Analytics displays it. I was incorrectly under the impression that it was reported as unique visits / total orders but I've now realised it's sessions / total orders. At my company we have quite a few repeat purchasers. So, is it best that we stick to the sessions / total orders conversion rate? My understanding is multiple sessions from the same visitor would all count towards this conversion rate and because we have repeat purchasers these wouldn't be captured under the unique visits / total orders method? It's almost as if every session we would have to consider that we have an opportunity to convert. The flip side of this is that on some of our higher margin products customers may visit multiple times before making a purchase. I should probably add that I'll be benchmarking data based on averages from the 1st April - 31st of March which is a financial year in the UK. The other KPI we will be benchmarking against is visitors. Should we change this to sessions if we will be benchmarking conversion rate using the sessions formula? This could help with continuity and could also help to reveal whether our planned content marketing efforts are engaging users. I hope this makes sense and thanks for reading and offering advice in advance. Joe
Reporting & Analytics | | joe-ainswoth1 -
A couple of [daft] analytics questions
Hello Mozzers, I have a couple of anaytics questions I wanted to ask. What does 'Not Set' refer to? I assume it is when the user has switched off cookies, but was wondering if this is correct or if there were other circumstances that would trigger this? When I look at my reverse goal paths, the same page is in path 1, 2 and 3... Are the pages refreshing? Thanks! Amelia
Reporting & Analytics | | CommT0 -
Reach local driving up bounce rate...
Hi all! I have a new client that I did a website for. After a month, looking at the analytics, it shows that while the site visits from reach local is more than the organic google, the reachlocal traffic is bouncing, causing the overall website bounce rate to skyrocket. Organic bounce rate is 47.62% and the reachlocal is at 84.25% driving the overall bounce rate to 68! Duration of the reachlocal traffic is at :56 vs 3:41 for organic. (SEE ATTACHED IMAGE) I'm guessing this all means that the reachlocal traffic is obviously not quality, so does that mean they are targeting non-relevant keywords? I don't have any experience dealing with reachlocal. Should I recommend my client to drop it? And if so, how to stop that traffic from coming to the site? I'm sure this is an easy one for you pros! Thanks! ~BB MUW959h.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | BBuck0 -
Why do I have a lot of direct traffic from MSN and Yahoo with 100% bounce rate?
For MSN I have about 8000 hits of one page and a 100% bounce rate. In the last month I have about 400 hits from Yahoo with a 100% bounce rate. Msn is all different pages, while Yahoo is all the home page. What would cause this?
Reporting & Analytics | | EcommerceSite0 -
Google Analytics - Referral Traffic Question
How Google Analytics determine that some particular web site referred traffic if there is no back link on that site?
Reporting & Analytics | | DiamondJewelryEmpire1 -
Strange bounce rate trending
what would make it jump up/down so suddenly like that? bouncerate.png
Reporting & Analytics | | adriandg0 -
Reg Ex Question about Rewrite Rules
In this redirect rule, what does the "$1" mean? RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(oldsiteaustin|www.oldsiteaustin) [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://austin.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Reporting & Analytics | | SEOteamfl0 -
Increased Bounce Rate & Dollar Index?
We use Google Analytics on our ecommerce site and we recently made several changes to an important page. Due to logistical reasons, we couldn't perform a Google web optimizer test but tracked the page's numbers in analytics from before/after the changes were made. After a week, we noticed that the bounce rate on the page went up by about 10% but the dollar index also doubled. We're trying to figure out how this could happen, since it seems kind of odd. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | airnwater0