Time on Site vs Bounce Rate Question

[Linwright]

If you follow my questions here on SEOMoz, you know that we have quite a few issues with a particular site. http://bit.ly/RE8V2a

Our bounce rate was over 85% for quite some time. We changed the site template and the Bounce Rate has dropped to around 5%, but the Time on Site has dropped dramatically. We were just over two minutes, now we're averaging 1:34.

But here's the thing, time spent on the Home Page is averaging 24 seconds! What would you take away from this?

Thanks so much!

[irvingw]

You have three separate instance of GA analytics code on your home page. Your stats are probably all messed up. Here's my two cents. Take a few hours and read through your page source on your page templates and flag anything you see as questionable and make sure your code is clean. Sounds a little harsh but this is probably your best route for accuracy.

[LoganYard]

When I relaunched our website I noticed our bounce rate had dropped dramatically. After inspection, it was exactly what Irving said - multiple calls to your GA script. This fires the script several times, confusing the heck out of it, and really screwing up your data.

Remove the multiple GA scripts and you'll be fine!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

As the others mentioned, its probably a coding mistake. 5% bounce rate is phenomenal.

In addition, 24 seconds on homepage can be good or bad - depends on what the next action is (do visitors go further into the site, or leave?)

When working with a new template, I like to install something like ClickTale or Inspectlet (user mouse tracking code) so see exactly how users react to the new design. We use that (along with aggregated data from GA) to develop a better visitor flow - improving time on site and getting visitors where you want them to go.

[Linwright]

Thanks for the responses! So I basically need to run through all of the files to see where Google Analytics is and why there are so many occurrences of it. Ok, thanks again!

Any ideas on where to look? I only have access to the WP template files, where I only see it once in the Footer.php.

[irvingw]

Looks like your plugins settings need to be adjusted to remove GA tracking like Yoast and SEO Plus.

[Linwright]

Thank you!!