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I think it may be important to state that the only real "ding" is within your Analytics. Google does not use Analytics data in its search algorithm. So if you are monitoring bounce rate for that purpose, worry not.*

More than likely we're looking at a tracking anomaly of some kind, that, at its very worst, is throwing off your Analytics data.

• I might add that the "bounce rate" that DOES influence the search algorithm isn't really bounce rate, but dwell time. See what Duane Forrester wrote about here: http://www.bing.com/community/Site_Blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/08/02/how-to-build-quality-content.aspx

This metric is calculated internally by the search engines, and does not cull from Analytics data. Additionally, it is one of thousands of signals that influence ranking, and likely a relatively small one overall.

Just to add to my endorsement above:

This is the sort of data irregularity that happens when tracking isn't installed properly. Perhaps somehow the snippet is on some page twice? Difficult to say, and could be many things.

What Sean suggested is where I'd start too. Isolate that traffic that matches this pattern and view by page.

Hey there,

I was going to write up a full response, but honestly this video does it better than I even could. Have you seen it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nJzwDIf7r4

Your specific question begins to get answered around 2:25 mark, but you might want to watch the whole thing to get context. The part about default and custom segments begins around 4:50.

Basically, you can either query for a dynamic segmentation ("on the fly"), one of the default segments (same as the ones in the GA interface like direct, search, mobile, etc.), or one of your custom segments that you created in the interface.

You're gonna have to grab the ID associated with your custom segment and call it with:

&segment=gaid::{whatever the id of your segment is}

The ID that you need will be listed in your XML account feed (around 5:15 in the video).

Hope that helps.

Chris,

One way or another, unfortunately, your data will have to end up in Excel for you to get everything you want. Custom reports are powerful, but I suspect getting it all together simply will be impossible.

So, the issue is now: the pain in the ass that is re-downloading tons of .csvs everytime.

Ultimately, you'd probably best just hiring a GA API expert to build out what you want.

But if you want to give it a go on your own, I think where you might get a lot of help is from an Analytics Excel plugin like Excellent Analytics.

It can be a bit cumbersome getting the data out that you want, BUT the real benefit is that once you do have the queries in place, you can click update and the new data will roll in (see about 3/4 of the way down on their how-to page: http://excellentanalytics.com/how-to/). I can imagine a scenario where you have a few queries that pull raw data, then some a bunch of references in your master table of data.

Also, they're not the only ones with a GA/Excel plugin.

Good Luck

Mike

I think Margarita is referring to tracking in Omniture, rather than Google Analytics.
Margarita, have you tried tagging your destination URLs with a campaign parameter that you've specified in Omniture as paid? This post might shed some light:http://blogs.omniture.com/2009/03/10/organic-vs-paid-search-detection/

Ewan,

Very interesting indeed. Because this is a public question, I think it could end up being tremendously helpful if you'd post any further findings. I don't want to take up too much of your time, so no need for a novel.

I suppose it's possible that having malformed tracking parameters on the (organic) Google Product URLs (missing utm_campaign) could be breaking things on the paid side as well.

Mike

Let me ask one simple question before looking further:

When you're tagging your Google Product Feed URLs, are you including source, medium, AND campaign. In the original post, you only mention medium and source. Campaign is also required, and it may just be that not including campaign is causing the whole thing to get thrown out.

Secondly, AdWords product listing ads, as far as I know (and have seen), should ALWAYS report as paid, rather than organic. Assuming you've got auto-tagging set up (in the AdWords settings), I'm not sure how this could be taking place.

Let's start there and work from there.