Help With Analytics Data

[AWCthreads]

Hello,

I'm seeing the following Analytics data for some of my keywords:

Multiple Visits

Pages/Visit: 1

Avg Visit Duration: 00:00

% New Visits: 100%

Bounce Rate: 100%

The data is the same on all "affected keywords".

What is going on and how do I fix it?

Thanks for the help!

[Sean_Dawes]

First questions to ask are what platform is the website on and are you sure analytics is installed properly? I like to get those out of the way first before you start to dive into more info.

And is this isolated to specific pages these keyword landing pages?

Run a custom report in google analytics by landing page with filter only containing those affected keywords

[AWCthreads]

Hi Sean,

We've got an ecommerce site on CMS.

I thought Analytics was installed properly - perhaps not. I've not seen this before.

The keywords are random and widespread. I'm in Traffic Sources>Sources>Search>Overview

My finger hovering over the panic button is developing a hair trigger.

[AWCthreads]

Just thought of something else. We're also set up with a product feed.

[Sean_Dawes]

How did you setup a product feed and where is it being pushed to?

[AWCthreads]

We've got a company managing the feed for us and we're feeding Google, Bing and The Find. On a side note, The Find is worthless.

I'm sending our feed manager an email now with a screenshot of the data.

[AWCthreads]

The feed manager says they didn't touch anything in our Analytics account.

He added that they have the same type of thing happening in their Analytics account as if it was a "normal" type of occurrance.

Doesn't seem normal to me, so I'm hoping someone knows what's going on.

[mikecp]

Just to add to my endorsement above:

This is the sort of data irregularity that happens when tracking isn't installed properly. Perhaps somehow the snippet is on some page twice? Difficult to say, and could be many things.

What Sean suggested is where I'd start too. Isolate that traffic that matches this pattern and view by page.

[AWCthreads]

What was occurring was a one day snapshot of a page bounce. What was throwing me off is the 00:00 time on page.

The data was from one day, so the pages with no time on page and 100% bounce rate did not have time to gather more looks and influence the data accordingly.

I did not know that Google does not count time on page if the person bounced from the page they entered - no matter how much time spent, content read, page scrolled etc.

Unfortunately, the page may be highly relevant, but we get no credit for time on page and we get dinged for a high bounce rate.

[mikecp]

I think it may be important to state that the only real "ding" is within your Analytics. Google does not use Analytics data in its search algorithm. So if you are monitoring bounce rate for that purpose, worry not.*

More than likely we're looking at a tracking anomaly of some kind, that, at its very worst, is throwing off your Analytics data.

• I might add that the "bounce rate" that DOES influence the search algorithm isn't really bounce rate, but dwell time. See what Duane Forrester wrote about here: http://www.bing.com/community/Site_Blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/08/02/how-to-build-quality-content.aspx

This metric is calculated internally by the search engines, and does not cull from Analytics data. Additionally, it is one of thousands of signals that influence ranking, and likely a relatively small one overall.