Are Your Website Visitors Really “Bouncing”

Bounce rate is a very common metric to measure engagement on your website. It’s defined as someone who entered your site, saw one page, and then left.

Google Analytics has recently released a new “Adjusted Bounce Rate” tracking feature. Does your site or page need this feature? Let’s find out…

Blogs, sites with widgets, and sites with flash or video embeded are notorious for having high bounce rates. This is simply because the content the user was searching for is all on one page and once they received the satisfaction from the page the user left. This goes into the analytics platform as 100% bounce rate. Such a high bounce rate is very problematic for the website owner because we really don’t know if the user consumed everything they needed to consume in the time they were on the website.

This is where the new Adjusted Bounce Rate tracking provides an answer. By placing a piece of code on your page, you can set a timer once each user reaches your page to see if they spent the minimal time on your website. You decide that ideal minimal time a user should stay on your site in the analytics code.

Here are some suggestions for site element times:

Blog:
Time yourself reading halfway through the blog page and use this time. Why? By the time they read halfway through your blog article, they probably have an idea of what site they are on and have seen your logo.

Video:
Give at least 15 seconds for this timer to make sure users at least start the video on your page. Why? Sometimes videos take a moment to buffer.

Widget/Flash/Game:
Provide the user about 10 seconds of time to start playing the game or using the widget or flash application.  Why? In 10 seconds time, the user should be able to understand how to use the Widget/Flash/Game and make a move.

Important note!
Google Analytics cautions that using this new code may slow down user experience and increase the number of hits your site sends to the Google Analytics servers. If you are close to the free account limitations, we urge you to be careful. The EIM Analytics team advises using this to gain insights over a short period of time, obtain the learnings and remove this code from the website. Please use this new code with caution or with the assistance of an agency partner.