Why would my Bounce Rate drop from 40% to 2% over 3 days without making any major changes to my site www.hiltonhead.com?

[CorkyGifford]

Our Wordpress site has had an historical bounce rate of 40% for the last 3 years but last Thursday it dropped to 17%, Friday to 7% and now is running at 2%. The pageviews per visit have also increased from 3 to almost 6.

Thanks

[overtake]

umm that's a loaded question. I'd start by segmenting your traffic - that is search, direct and referral - compare the different timeframes. If there is a dramatic difference work out why? If nothing starts out just compare everything in your analytics account, could be a new ranking, referral. Also you could have lost a ranking or a link so actually your bounce rate has gone down because your overall traffic has gone down.

[Kotkov]

have you installed any new js scripts? analytics + commerce?

any new plugins?

any suspicious traffic?

[KeriMorgret]

I'm thinking the same way Serge is. I've seen that happen when you get two analytics scripts firing at once, especially if one is a plugin and one is custom-coded.

[KeriMorgret]

I'm looking at the source, and I see /google_analytics_auto.js as well as Yoast's wordpress script. You might want to ask about that and see if someone just installed one of those and if that's causing the problem.

[CorkyGifford]

Serge and Keri,

thanks for your response, after getting your replies i checked and indeed there was an additional google_analytics_auto.js file that was installed. Turns out that Hostgator's cpanel has a google analytics integration program that was activated on the 9th (when everything started getting weird) and it modified my .htaccess file to load the additional .js file ... hopefully that was the problem ,will keep you updated.

Thank you!