Adjustable Bounce Rate

[BeckyKey]

Hi

I've been looking at analysing bounce rate in more depth, I wondered what people's views on adjustable bounce rate were? I've been reading this article http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2322974/how-to-implement-adjusted-bounce-rate-abr-via-google-tag-manager-tutorial

Is it worth adding this? Or is it just as useful to look at time on page over bounce rate?

[DirkC]

Time on page has the same issue - suppose somebody visits your site - spends 10 minutes reading an article & then goes to another site. It will be counted as a bounced visit - but even worse - the 10 minutes spend on your site will not be measured in Analytics (check http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/29/understanding-google-analytics-time-calculations/)

This is one of the advantages of the Advanced Content tracking - it measures better what people are doing on your site. The fact that the bounce rate decreases for me isn't the big win - the fact that you get better time measurement on site & that you can check the interaction (do they scroll to the end) are the things that bring benefit.

If you don't want to use the tag manager - you can also do this with the normal tracking code: http://cutroni.com/blog/2014/02/12/advanced-content-tracking-with-universal-analytics/ (Cutroni is the Analytics Advocate @Google)

Dirk

[BeckyKey]

Hi Dirk,

Thanks for your response. So are you saying Adjustable Bounce rate is also not beneficial?

I thought that if you took into account the time spent on page, and set these parameters in analytics, that it wouldn't in fact be counted as a bounce?

I'll also look into the content tracking you mentioned - is this also useful for ecommerce? I'm not always expected people to scroll right to the end of pages.

Thanks

[DirkC]

It can be useful - it depends on what you want to know. If you do not implement either of them - the time on site will not be correct as there will be no time on site calculated for bounced visits.

Personally - I prefer to know if people scroll to the end of the page (so I assume they have read the article) rather than just put an arbitrary time to fire an event. It will in both cases make the time measurement on your site more accurate. Both ways of measurement will reduce the bounce rate.

I think it's certainly useful for e-commerce - but then I would rather use enhanced e-commerce tracking.

I don't really understand what you mean with "I thought that if you took into account the time spent on page, and set these parameters in analytics, that it wouldn't in fact be counted as a bounce?" - could you explain?

Dirk

[BeckyKey]

Thanks, for me I think I want to know what pages people find useful and what ones they don't but with ecommerce it's a bit more difficult.

My overall goal is to provide content the user wants to see on product pages.

On that last point, I thought that when you add code to fire an event when someone has been on a page for X amount of time, if they only access this page, but you've set this event - it won't be counted as a bounce?

I'll read up on the ecommerce tracking too thanks!

[TomRayner]

Picking up on Dirk saying:

I prefer to know if people scroll to the end of the page (so I assume they have read the article) rather than just put an arbitrary time to fire an event.

This was shared the other day - it's a way of pulling in scroll-depth data into your Google Analytics reports.  Incredibly useful:

http://scrolldepth.parsnip.io/

[BeckyKey]

Amazing thanks!

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[DirkC]

Hi Becky,

You are correct - normally if a tag is fired it won't be counted as bounce (unless you set "noninteraction=true" - check https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068#NonInteractionEvents)

Dirk

[BeckyKey]

Hi

Thank you for the reply. I have looked at User Flow but I tend to get a bit lost in the amount of data and finding exactly what I need.

Can you segment and filter this by landing page?

I can see the drop offs, but not the drop off for new users - or is this report based on new users only?

Thank you!

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[BeckyKey]

I've only just seen this

Thank you! I'll try and get to grips with User Flow, I need to dedicate some time to analysing the data

Becky