Please Settle a Bounce Rate Debate

[jesse-landry]

Here's the Question:

If a person clicks a PPC ad and hits the landing page, and the landing page has a form to fill out embedded in it without having to click, does that count as a bounce if the person leaves the page immediately after filling out and submitting the form or does the submission negate the bounce tally?

Hope this makes sense and thanks in advance.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

I don't think this should be counted as a bounce, because the visitor converted by filling out the form, but analytics may track it as a bounce, because they left after one page and the form submission may not be counted. I would trigger the form to fire an event upon successful completion, the event by default should count as an interaction and thus not as a bounce on the site.

See this resource here from Google Analytics - https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide#non-interaction

Particularly, this sentence - they're talking here about the default consideration of events, as long you don't specify it's a non-interaction event - "a single-page session on a page that includes event tracking will not be counted as a bounce if the visitor also triggers the event during the same session."

So set up an event to capture form submission, and this should solve your one page visit/form submission/bounce rate quandary.

Good luck,

Mark

[EGOL]

If you have the form designed to deliver a "thank you" page then the visitor got a second pageview - as long as the thank you page has a unique URL that is able to be counted by the analytics.

I would deliver an interesting thank you page with lots of great options for the visitor to click.

[MoosaHemani]

Bounce Rate for Google Analytics is that a visitor hits the page and gets out without shifting to another page, it will be considered as bounce rate.

In your case, I agree with EGOL to add a thank you page so that technically it should visit another page and your bounce rate will come to natural again!

Hope this helps!

[jesse-landry]

Thank you everybody for providing the answer I was seeking! This is exactly what I thought was the case and now I have more opinions/links to back me up.

The thing is our submission doesn't yield a unique Thank You page. Instead it wipes the form and reveals a Thank You message in the form's place. For whatever reason this is how my boss wanted it done and I disagree and want a new page to come up (even if in a new window) to ensure an event's triggered and analytics doesn't lose it.

Mark - Is there any sort of "event" that I can trigger which won't load a new page or affect anything the user sees per se? I feel like my only option here is to do as EGOL is saying. And to be honest, that's what I want to do anyway. Why would a user want to stay on the page they were just on after filling out a form? What use is that page to them after they've filled it out and are waiting for a response?

Bah! I swear 80% of my job is convincing site owners that they're thinking is backwards and having to essentially "argue" (for lack of a better word) with them about it.

Anyway, thanks fellas.

[EGOL]

Bah! I swear 80% of my job is convincing site owners that they're thinking is backwards and having to essentially "argue" (for lack of a better word) with them about it.

lol... thanks for the laugh...  Sometimes I feel that exact same way responding to questions here in Q&A.  And sometimes they do ARGUE! and call me a fidiot.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

The form could trigger a google analytics event on successful submission without having to take you to a confirmation page. You often have ajax forms that don't load a new page, and you can track success of the form with a google analytics event and a not a pageview of a thank you page. A very popular solution that works this way on Wordpress is Contact Form 7.

When your form "wipes the data" as you said and shows the customer the successful form submission, you can trigger a Google analytics event then.

Mark

[jesse-landry]

haha yes I couldn't agree more. "FIDIOT?!" hilarious

[jesse-landry]

Mark,

Thank you for this. May I ask if I'm doing this correctly? I have a quick jquery tag in the header that reads:

jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
// Track submission events.
  $('#quote-form').submit(function() {
        _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'R4Q', 'Form submission']);
  });
});

Where "quote-form" is the form id of course.

Is this correct? Thanks again

[EGOL]

lol...  I made that word up this morning...

Do you know what it means?

I couldn't decide if it should be fidiot or f'idiot or F'indiot

[jesse-landry]

How bout shidiot? ...this thread is degenerating I apologize.

[jesse-landry]

Nevermind it totally worked. I just tested it out on a dummy page and it tracked the event.

Thank you all incredibly much for all the help. This is fantastic and is going to make me look like a rock-star.