Bounce Rate
-
Howdy Mozzers
Does anyone know if the 'average time on site' in Google analytics is calculated with bounce rate included?
For example if you have a 50% bounce rate and your average time on site is 2 minutes the actual time would be 4 minutes as the 50% bounce rate time is classed as 0.
I hope that is clear!
Cheers
-
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a certain page or site who only visited one page and then left the site. It's not related to the amount of time spent on a site. The amount of time spent on a site is the average time overall for time spent on the site before leaving. Hope that helps.
-
Going back a step, "Average Time On Site' in my opinion, is not a relevant statistic any more as internet connection speed increases.
With dial up connection the customer paid per minute on-line. Now with flat rates for broadband people leave pages open when they step away from their computers - I've had pages open at the office literally for days! That would really muck up anyone's stats. (That's not why I do it though)
-
There is an easy way to fix this. Create a custom advanced segment to only include visits with pageviews > 1. This will allow you to see avg time on site for all visitors excluding bounces.
-
I think it could massively confuse things if they didn't take it into account. Should those page views be deleted as well then? Do they not count as unique visitors or visitors at all?
Don;t get me wrong, I see where you are coming from, but the completely objective data is what makes GA so valuable.
-
It's a shame Google are counting this. I see their reasons though I believe. Bounces did originally want to view your site, so they are a visitor in theory. It does skew the data massively however
-
Yep good answer cheers.
Conclusion - Totally inaccurate!
-
-
There is some great info about this on this link: https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=7f1a0537ed9f8fe8&hl=en
Rather than me paraphrasing and messing it up or copying/plagiarizing their answer, I'll just point you in the right direction.
-
Can you provide a link to the horses mouth?
-
Average time on site includes bounces (counted as 0 seconds) in the calculations.
See http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/01/standard-metrics-revisited-time-on-page-and-time-on-site.html
-
Agreed! Very misleading and inaccurate if it is included.
-
Haha don't worry your safe...for now!
Like all thing its should be used as a relative measure but it can be quite misleading especially for an obsessed client who doesn't know the real meaning of bounce rate, hence the reason for my question so I can explain it but the time on site is also misleading if the bounce rate is included.
-
I'm pretty sure that bounced traffic isn't calculated in the average time on site, Analytics put 0 because it can't calculate the time on site unless a visitor hit a second page within the same Analytics code (site). I'm not 100% sure but that would be really irrelevant to include bounced traffic to this metric.
-
Yeah, I'm assuming that from Googles view of analytics is post search, thus time after search...
I might be completely wrong (don't sue, kill or hurt me!), however I couldn't find a better answer from a more reputable source!
-
Hmm I guess it could be clearer and be labelled as 'avg. time on site' rather than 'time after search' which I assume your referring to?
-
I've always believed that the time on site is a global average of all visitors. Never thought to question myself until now though. Aran seems to have found the answer. Thanks
-
Hi, your question led me on an interesting trip though Google help, revisiting the basics of analytics.
Google define the Bounce Rate as:
"Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page" - Google Webmaster Help http://bit.ly/gPPNPj - This makes me think of single page sites, do they have 100% bounce rate?
Heres a look at how Google Analytics performs it calculations. http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=77234
What I took from this is that all visitor times are taken and averaged, bounce or not.
Cheers
Aran
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What's Causing My Extremely Low Bounce Rate
My client's site that is reporting an under 10% bounce rate for all sources. Direct is the highest at 8%. I'm no expert in GA but wondering if there is a problem with the analytics/tag manager code on the site. I'm especially concerned about the GTM body script being in an iframe which I read could be trouble. <!-- Google Tag Manager (noscript) -->
Reporting & Analytics | | bradsimonis
<noscript><iframe src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-MWGMNW6"
height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden"></iframe></noscript>
<!-- End Google Tag Manager (noscript) --> You can see all the source code here:
view-source:https://nfinit.com/0 -
Bounce Rate Extremely Low
Bounce rate for one of my client's website has drastically reduced. Its below 5%. Have ensured that GA code is placed only once. Any help or tips in identifying the root cause is much appreciated. Shall be happy to share the URL if required.
Reporting & Analytics | | seoninj0 -
Why might my websites crawl rate....explode?
Hi Mozzers, I have a website with approx 110,000 pages. According to search console, Google will usually crawl, on average, anywhere between 500 - 1500 pages per day. However, lately the crawl rate seems to have increased rather drastically: 9/5/16 - 923
Reporting & Analytics | | Silkstream
9/6/16 - 946
9/7/16 - 848
9/8/16 - 11072
9/9/16 - 50923
9/10/16 - 60389
9/11/16 - 17170
9/12/16 - 79809 I was wondering if anyone could offer any insight into why may be happening and if I should be concerned?
Thanks in advance for all advice.1 -
High Bounce Rate on traffic generating area of our site
Hi, Our eCommerce site currently includes a blog section known as Igloo which we have filled with unique and helpful content that is useful to a fair few people, not just customers of ours. It currently attracts a large number of visitors (more than the actual eCommerce side of the site in actual fact) organically who aren't currently customers of ours. Very few of these turn in to paying clients so it's not really a money spinner but it has worked quite well from a linkbait perspective / traffic generation perspective and undoubtedly a few of these people do end up making a purchase on the actual shopping end of our site. We're look at ways to encourage these people finding help on this free resource to take a look at our homepage and hopefully make an order but in the meantime I am worried that there may be a few downsides to us creating this content: Google may see us more as a help site than a shopping site. Since selling products is where we make our money this could ultimately be a bad thing. Our bounce rate is REALLY high (I'm talking around 94%) on the help site versus around 20% on the eCommerce site. I guess people land on the article they want, read it and then disappear. Would this bounce rate skew our entire site stats and ultimately result in decreased performance in the SERPS. I would appreciate your opinions and, in the event you do feel it may be hurting us overall perhaps some suggestions on how to mitigate the effects? Many thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | ChrisHolgate0 -
*Dramatic* reduction in bounce rate, why?
Hi all I cannot pin this down to one of -new theme using Thesis 2 and Social Triggers, or -implementing Moz Does the Moz crawler linger on page? I'd love to know why this is happening 7iSnNfC
Reporting & Analytics | | TimMarsh0 -
Irrelevant page with high bounce rate
I have a page on my site, www.waikoloavacationrentals.com/kolea-rentals/floor-plans, that gets me roughly 17% of my traffic. That being said it is not really relevant traffic because it comes from the search term "floor plans", which really has nothing to do with Hawaii vacation rentals, which is what I do. My question is does Google know how to figure that out when they are looking at my stats or is there a way to let google know that that page probably should not show up for that search phrase? On the positive, they are nice floor plans and if someone is searching for ideas for floor plans and see one of them in google images then it probably could help them, but it really is not relevant to my business. It has a 80% bounce rate, but does have an average time on page of 1.5 minutes, which is a fair amount for what is there.
Reporting & Analytics | | RobDalton0 -
Reach local driving up bounce rate...
Hi all! I have a new client that I did a website for. After a month, looking at the analytics, it shows that while the site visits from reach local is more than the organic google, the reachlocal traffic is bouncing, causing the overall website bounce rate to skyrocket. Organic bounce rate is 47.62% and the reachlocal is at 84.25% driving the overall bounce rate to 68! Duration of the reachlocal traffic is at :56 vs 3:41 for organic. (SEE ATTACHED IMAGE) I'm guessing this all means that the reachlocal traffic is obviously not quality, so does that mean they are targeting non-relevant keywords? I don't have any experience dealing with reachlocal. Should I recommend my client to drop it? And if so, how to stop that traffic from coming to the site? I'm sure this is an easy one for you pros! Thanks! ~BB MUW959h.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | BBuck0 -
Bounce Rates - How would you deal with this scenario?
Greetings! I actually don't have a definitive answer to this so wish to throw it out to the community for thoughts and feedback. I have a client who we shall call "Site 1", but they also have a job board, we shall call "Site 2". A product of their own success, they have a high bounce rate with visitors landing on Site 1, seeing a job they want to apply for and bouncing straight off to Site 2. The problem is that this is resulting in Google seeing some of these pages as having bounce rates of 80% to 100%, based on this formula: Bounce rate = total number of visits viewing only one page / total number of visits Now, I hate anything black hat or grey hat so wish to know how you would deal with this... If the results from Site 2 were displayed in a new framed page on Site 1, would this still be classed as a bounce? If when they click on a job on Site 1, they were taken to an intermediate page on Site 1 saying "Thank you, you are being redirected to your chosen job" for 5 seconds before being taken to Site 2, would this be classed as a bounce? Perhaps the job they wish to apply for 'pulled' from Site 2 and actually displayed in a new page on Site 1 would be a better way to go? I think that option 1 might work, sure that number 3 would but not so sure about number 2, but look forward to your comments and thoughts. Regards, Andy
Reporting & Analytics | | Andy.Drinkwater0