Bounce Rate Spike Overnight - Did anyone else notice this?

[CamiloSC]

Hello Moz Community,

Starting August 12th, 2015, my overall website traffic bounce rate spiked literally over night and I am trying to figure out why?

My traffic increase rate remained the same.
My time on page actually nearly doubled.
but my bounce rate shot up from 9% to 82%.

This is the same issue for almost every page in my 500+ page website. My bounce rate in every page was always below 14%. And literally over night on August 12th, the bounce rate skyrocketed.

Did something roll out around that time?
Does anyone else have this same issue that would be kind enough to share some insight?

[aarongray]

I haven't seen or heard of any changes but I do know that if you had two different analytics codes on the site at the same time it can play with the bounce rate and normally give you a very low bounce rate.

Did you change or remove any analytics codes around this date?

[CamiloSC]

I did have Google Analytics on the website, and them i connected my analytics account with the Yoast SEO premium account. Which i have now learned that the license key is currently not active since my server has an outdated version of PHP module cURL. We will be updating that in 2 days. Could this be a reason?

[Jono_M]

Did the bounce rate increase across all referral sources?

[aarongray]

Yes this could be giving you issues. when you connected your yoast account did you remove the other code?

Even if the yoast one isn't working it would still be playing with your stats coming in.

[Eric_Rohrback]

Like Jono mentioned, check your referral traffic. I would recommend going into your analytics account, and segmenting by all sessions/organic/referral/direct to really see what is causing the high bounce rate. If it's referral traffic it's most likely referral spam. There are some good tools out there and filters to help get rid of that garbage and true up your numbers a bit more.