Low bounce rate; need help troubleshooting code
-
I've had an outside developer do a bunch of custom work in Google Analytics to get my site to integrate with Foxycart and accurately report sales in the ecommerce section. With a foxycart upgrade came more GA tweaking, and now my bounce rate is at 1-2%. I know this isn't right, and suspecting there is something triggering GA a second time, causing a second page load, or something.
Could someone that loves code look at http://www.strikemodels.com/ and tell me if they can easily spot what's obliterating the accuracy of my bounce rate calculations? Or do I need to go back to my dev and up the can of GA worms to troubleshoot things?
As you can tell by the code, I'm running the latest version of WP with a few plugins, Thesis 1.8, and on Apache.
-
Glad it is working correctly now.
If you talk to the developer, they may be able to preload the google stack for your analytics pluging to use. The problem is that the ga.js is getting accessed twice. They should have picked that up the during the development, if they had access to your webserver. I would lean on them to fix this issue. It should be a 10min fix for a js programmer.
-
My bounce rate is at 50% this morning, so that must have been it. What I liked about the plugin was that it automatically tagged the external links and pdfs. However, an accurate bounce rate is a more important metric for me.
There's another question in Q&A right now about using an analytics plugin. I'll add my experiences in a comment over there.
Thanks for the help/validation!
-
I've deactivated it, and will check back in the morning to see if the data looks better. I think before when I've looked at the code, I was logged in as admin, and the plugin doesn't insert itself when you're admin, so i was seeing just the one set of code.
-
When you look at the head section you can see where ga.js is injected twice.
I would say that is what she did. She should have disabled the analytics plugin. You should be able to do that from the admin page without a developer.
-
I'm wondering if she put in the async code and didn't realize that it was also in there with the analytics plugin. I'll send her a note in the morning and ask if that might be it. I wanted to do a little figuring out on my own before I started running up her clock and my bill.
-
If you visit gtmetrix.com and look at the 'timeline' you will see two javascript calls one to external-tracking-min.js and ga.js both are most likely calling analytics as on a js scanner I see ga.js being called twice.
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 -
404 Status Codes in Google Search Console
Hi all, I've noticed in Google Search Console under 'Crawl errors' - 1. Why does the status code '410' come up as an 'error' in the crawl report? 2. Why are some articles labelled as '404' error when they have been completely deleted and should be a '410' - there are roughly around 1000-2000 of these. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | lucwiesman0 -
Free Media Site / High Traffic / Low Engagement / Strategies and Questions
Hi, Imagine a site "mediapalooza dot com" where the only thing you do there is view free media. Yet Google Analytics is showing the average view of a media page is about a minute; where the average length of media is 20 - 90 minutes. And imagine that most of this media is "classic" and that it is generally not available elsewhere. Note also that the site ranks terribly in Google, despite having decent Domain Authority (in the high 30's), Page Authority in the mid 40's and a great site and otherwise quite active international user base with page views in the tens of thousands per month. Is it possible that GA is not tracking engagement (time on site) correctly? Even accounting for the imperfect method of GA that measures "next key pressed" as a way to terminate the page as a way to measure time on page, our stats are truly abysmal, in the tenths of a percentage point of time measured when compared with actual time we think the pages are being used. If so, will getting engagement tracking to more accurately measure time on specif pages and site signal Google that this site is actually more important than current ranking indicates? There's lots of discussion about "dwell time" as this relates to ranking, and I'm postulating that if we can show Google that we have extremely good engagement instead of the super low stats that we are reporting now, then we might get a boost in ranking. Am I crazy? Has anyone got any data that proves or disproves this theory? as I write this out, I detect many issues - let's have a discussion on what else might be happening here. We already know that low engagement = low ranking. Will fixing GA to show true engagement have any noticeable impact on ranking? Can't wait to see what the MOZZERS think of this!
Reporting & Analytics | | seo_plus0 -
Title Tag Capitalization Impact on SERP Rankings and Click Through Rates
My company made a branding decision to use lowercase for all of our title tags. This, of course, means that our titles on SERPs are all lower case. Overwhelmingly, it seems that websites use title case. This makes me wonder if we're shooting ourselves in the foot. Does using lower case titles negatively impact our rankings and/or click through rates? Is there any data out there suggesting that title case has a better click through rate than lower case? Thanks for reading!
Reporting & Analytics | | Solid_Gold0 -
*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 -
Has anyone had any success when requesting help from Bing?
For the past month I have been struggling to resolve a problem with an increasing number of 404 crawl errors in Bing. (Only Bing reports these error, not Google and not Moz.) I did receive email from them requesting a server log (which I have now sent 5 times.) Their response, please send a server log. The last email I sent (6/21) explained there should be server log attached, if they did not get it, not why not? Do they have a restriction on file size? What other compression types do they accept? It has been very frustrating to deal with them and all of their responses are between 9 PM and midnight. Almost a week later, no reply. Any suggestions how I can get out of this seemingly endless loop and get a helpful response during normal business hours (PDT)?
Reporting & Analytics | | PerriCline0 -
Bounce rate consistently dropping
We started using SEO MOZ campaigns and crawl diagnostics for our site in November 2011. At that time, our bounce rate was 57.58%. From there, it has consistently dropped. Dec. 57% Jan. 24.86% Feb. 14.61% March 17.48 % April 12.35% We started out with 1,000's of errors showing up in the crawl diagnostics, down to under 50. could this be associated with the bounce rate drop?
Reporting & Analytics | | Stevej240 -
Google Product Feed help
Hello, We are working with a particular service that uses our Google product feed to pull information. We wanted to add product info such as dimensions and hex colors for each product to better service the third party we are using, but we not sure if this is something Google supports in their feed. Would it cause any problems if we added that info in? Thanks for any help! Also, my knowledge regarding a Google product feed is lacking so if the question is confusing or I didn't give enough info on our situation just let me know and I'll do what I can to better explain.
Reporting & Analytics | | ClaytonKendall0