Bounce Rate Suddenly Drops on Google Analytics

[mattdinbrooklyn]

Hi Everyone,

So in the span of a couple days the bounce rate of the site that I work for went from 50 percent to 6 percent. We're seeing a decrease in time on site for Organic traffic as well for slide shows (some of the pages have gone from 8 minutes on a page down to one) and pageviews have dramatically increased on those pages as well. Also some organic traffic has gone from a 90 percent bounce rate to a 7 percent. I'm also seeing a dramatic decrease in Exit Rate as well (around a 80% to a 40% drop in the span of a couple days). The bounce rate is now steady at 5-6 percent which seems impossible (especially since we have 75% of our traffic come from new visitors). Can anyone help me find out how this happened or where to look?

Thanks!

[SErOb]

• Could be bots/crawlers/scrapers.
• Have the number of organic visitors dropped?
• Were any changes made to Analytics (e.g., ABR)?

[mattdinbrooklyn]

• Could be bots/crawlers/scrapers.

How can I check the bots/crawlers/scapers?

• Have the number of organic visitors dropped?

Organic visitors have not dropped but visits and uniques have dropped 5% while pageviews have increased 14% and pages per session have increased by 20%.

• Were any changes made to Analytics (e.g., ABR)?

I don't believe so but they were implementing Parsely at the time so something might have happened in dev that I don't know about.

[mattdinbrooklyn]

This post is deleted!

[Ray-pp]

It sounds like Google Analytics tracking could be implemented twice. Google fires a pageview when a visitor lands on the page. If two GA snippets are implemented and someone lands on your page, they cannot track the bounce since they think the other snippets' page view counts as an interaction and the bounce rate drops to nearly nothing.

[mattdinbrooklyn]

Excellent! Thanks, how can I check that?

[mattdinbrooklyn]

Also if GA is implemented twice wouldn't we be seeing a higher increase in pageviews than 14%?

[SErOb]

Do you have the Analytics Tag Assistant for Chrome?  That can help you verify analytics is set up and working properly.

[Ray-pp]

If you've implemented the GA tracking code directly to the template, then you should see 2 tracking snippets in the source code (view source, search for your Analytics ID).

However, if you've implemented GA tracking through a Tag Manager, you may have a single tracking code in the source and the second wouldn't necessarily show up in the source.

I cannot necessarily say that you should be noticing higher than 14% increase in pageviews, tbh. It depends on the implementation, error, and browsing activity. (i.e. it isn't a straight 2x increase)

[mattdinbrooklyn]

See that's the strange thing. I don't see it at all in the source code and using Analytics Tag Assistant it says UA was implemented through Non-standard implementation. If you'd like to look at it please do so. It's at Flavorwire.

[KeriMorgret]

Be sure to look in an incognito window. Often times a CMS will suppress the analytics tracking info from being in the code if you're logged in as admin, so you'll just see the non-standard tracking code and nothing else. [Voice of experience speaking here!]