Bounce Rate
-
Howdy Mozzers
Does anyone know if the 'average time on site' in Google analytics is calculated with bounce rate included?
For example if you have a 50% bounce rate and your average time on site is 2 minutes the actual time would be 4 minutes as the 50% bounce rate time is classed as 0.
I hope that is clear!
Cheers
-
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a certain page or site who only visited one page and then left the site. It's not related to the amount of time spent on a site. The amount of time spent on a site is the average time overall for time spent on the site before leaving. Hope that helps.
-
Going back a step, "Average Time On Site' in my opinion, is not a relevant statistic any more as internet connection speed increases.
With dial up connection the customer paid per minute on-line. Now with flat rates for broadband people leave pages open when they step away from their computers - I've had pages open at the office literally for days! That would really muck up anyone's stats. (That's not why I do it though)
-
There is an easy way to fix this. Create a custom advanced segment to only include visits with pageviews > 1. This will allow you to see avg time on site for all visitors excluding bounces.
-
I think it could massively confuse things if they didn't take it into account. Should those page views be deleted as well then? Do they not count as unique visitors or visitors at all?
Don;t get me wrong, I see where you are coming from, but the completely objective data is what makes GA so valuable.
-
It's a shame Google are counting this. I see their reasons though I believe. Bounces did originally want to view your site, so they are a visitor in theory. It does skew the data massively however
-
Yep good answer cheers.
Conclusion - Totally inaccurate!
-
-
There is some great info about this on this link: https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=7f1a0537ed9f8fe8&hl=en
Rather than me paraphrasing and messing it up or copying/plagiarizing their answer, I'll just point you in the right direction.
-
Can you provide a link to the horses mouth?
-
Average time on site includes bounces (counted as 0 seconds) in the calculations.
See http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/01/standard-metrics-revisited-time-on-page-and-time-on-site.html
-
Agreed! Very misleading and inaccurate if it is included.
-
Haha don't worry your safe...for now!
Like all thing its should be used as a relative measure but it can be quite misleading especially for an obsessed client who doesn't know the real meaning of bounce rate, hence the reason for my question so I can explain it but the time on site is also misleading if the bounce rate is included.
-
I'm pretty sure that bounced traffic isn't calculated in the average time on site, Analytics put 0 because it can't calculate the time on site unless a visitor hit a second page within the same Analytics code (site). I'm not 100% sure but that would be really irrelevant to include bounced traffic to this metric.
-
Yeah, I'm assuming that from Googles view of analytics is post search, thus time after search...
I might be completely wrong (don't sue, kill or hurt me!), however I couldn't find a better answer from a more reputable source!
-
Hmm I guess it could be clearer and be labelled as 'avg. time on site' rather than 'time after search' which I assume your referring to?
-
I've always believed that the time on site is a global average of all visitors. Never thought to question myself until now though. Aran seems to have found the answer. Thanks
-
Hi, your question led me on an interesting trip though Google help, revisiting the basics of analytics.
Google define the Bounce Rate as:
"Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page" - Google Webmaster Help http://bit.ly/gPPNPj - This makes me think of single page sites, do they have 100% bounce rate?
Heres a look at how Google Analytics performs it calculations. http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=77234
What I took from this is that all visitor times are taken and averaged, bounce or not.
Cheers
Aran
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
-
Increase in Direct Traffic plus Bounce Rate rise for all traffic sources
Hello, I work for an agency and we have seen a big rise in bounce rate for 4 of our clients which happened on the exact same day. This rise on bounce rate is across all traffic sources. We are also seeing a big increase in direct traffic, starting on the same day. Is it possible for bot traffic to affect the bounce rate of all other traffic sources? We have ruled out double reporting in GA but can explain how the bounce rate has increased for all traffic sources. How is this linked to the rise in direct traffic (in some cases as high as 500%)? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | jenallen0 -
Bounce rate and Chrome
My client had a large spike in their bounce rate at the end of June, 2017. After spending far too long looking around Google Analytics I discovered that the bounce rate increased 5x when version 59.0.3071.104 of Google Chrome appeared on the scene. Version 59.0.3071.102 and older had a bounce rate of about 13%. Version 59.0.3071.104 increased to 65%. Each subsequent version is about the same.FireFox, Safari and the rest are showing no significant changes.Any idea what is happening here?Many thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | climber170 -
Bounce Rates: Leaving my domain.com/blog to shop on mydomain.com counts as bounce rate?
Hello! I have a kind of difficult question. On my main domain i have: Store: mydomain.com and wordpress blog on mydomain.com/blog If I have a link to a specific product on my blog and user goes to the product on the store, will bounce rate increase or as it's the same domain will be like a new page view? Different CMS's and blog is on a different analytics account than the store. I hope i could explain myself! Thank you
Reporting & Analytics | | prozis0 -
Help Blocking Crawlers. Huge Spike in "Direct Visits" with 96% Bounce Rate & Low Pages/Visit.
Hello, I'm hoping one of you search geniuses can help me. We have a successful client who started seeing a HUGE spike in direct visits as reported by Google Analytics. This traffic now represents approximately 70% of all website traffic. These "direct visits" have a bounce rate of 96%+ and only 1-2 pages/visit. This is skewing our analytics in a big way and rendering them pretty much useless. I suspect this is some sort of crawler activity but we have no access to the server log files to verify this or identify the culprit. The client's site is on a GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting account. The way I see it, there are a couple of possibilities.
Reporting & Analytics | | EricFish
1.) Our client's competitors are scraping the site on a regular basis to stay on top of site modifications, keyword emphasis, etc. It seems like whenever we make meaningful changes to the site, one of their competitors does a knock-off a few days later. Hmmm. 2.) Our client's competitors have this crawler hitting the site thousands of times a day to raise bounce rates and decrease the average time on site, which could like have an negative impact on SEO. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe Google is going to reward sites with 90% bounce rates, 1-2 pages/visit and an 18 second average time on site. The bottom line is that we need to identify these bogus "direct visits" and find a way to block them. I've seen several WordPress plugins that claim to help with this but I certainly don't want to block valid crawlers, especially Google, from accessing the site. If someone out there could please weigh in on this and help us resolve the issue, I'd really appreciate it. Heck, I'll even name my third-born after you. Thanks for your help. Eric0 -
Specific Industry Website Conversion Rates: Lighting
Hi All, There's loads of info around on general retail conversion rates, but does anyone have any experience with online lighting shops and typical conversion rates? This is a highly price driven shopper, and from my experience so far they bounce around looking for the best price... We've recently taken ownership of this new site, and I'm not sure I can relate general metrics to this site... although there is lots of work to do on here! Cheers in advance.
Reporting & Analytics | | b4cab0 -
Google Analytics and Bounce Rates Query - Should I block access from foreign countries ?
Hi , When I look at my google analytics for my UK Website, I can see alot of visits come from outside the UK , i.e Brazil and USA. Both of which give me almost 100% bounce rates from people visiting from there. I am wondering, if google looks at bounce rates with regards to ranking factors and should I therefore block access to my site from visitors outside the UK ?... Would this help increase my rankings ? Given that we only serve uk customers, I cant see any benefit of allowing non uk customers the ability to see the site . what does people think ? thanks pete
Reporting & Analytics | | PeteC121 -
Will javascript generated links affect my bounce rate?
Hi all, I run a site called Applicable Jobs (http://www.applicablejobs.com) and from analyising my analytics I notice my bounce rate is unusually high at around 85%. I'm keen to get this right down as I've read recently that a high bounce rate is a metric Google uses in determining positioning in the SERPs. I honestly don't think it's the quality of my content because I feel it's genuinely useful to my target audience but I'm wondering if the way my jobs list is generated is causing an issue. At the moment I have my jobs listings generated through javascript so I can have nice effects and use a bit of ajax but if Google crawls it, it obviously won't be able to see the listings. So I'm wondering if when a user comes to the site and they click on one of the job listings, does the Google analytics code recognise that click because that link is generated through javascript? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Benji870 -
Conversion rates by browser & OS - any feedback/experts/experience?
Hi, Ive been evaluating conversion rates by operating system and by browser for a client. Ive picked up significant and somewhat disturbing trends. As you'd expect the bulk of traffic is coming from a Windows/Internet Explorer combination. This is unfortunately one of the worst combinations (Windows/Firefox & Windows/Safari did worse. Chrome/Windows was significantly the best combination with Windows). Windows also performs much worse than Mac. E.g. Windows/Firefox performs worse than Mac/Firefox. Overall conversion rate for Mac is 7.07% compared to 5.69% Windows. This is based on hundreds of thousands of visits and equates to tens of thousands of dollars difference in revenue. Generally later versions of browsers perform better on both main operating systems e.g IE 9.0 converts at 6.33% compared to 8.0 at 5.80% on Windows and Firefox 4.01 on the Mac converts at 7.57% compared to 3.6.16 at 6.54% (although this dataset is smaller than Windows/IE). Page load speeds (recorded in the clients analytics) are significantly faster on Mac than Windows (as expected really). Being Windows/IE and specifically Windows IE8 represents the bulk of traffic should we be addressing this? Will any optimisation negatively affect better performing Mac/Browser combinations? Understanding that Mac users equate to 'better' converting visitors - what else could be done there? Anyone have thoughts or experience on optimising pages for improved conversion rates via IE and Windows? Thanks in advance, Andy
Reporting & Analytics | | AndyMacLean0