Reduce bounce rate in Google Analytics

August 4, 2013 Blogs, Site optimization, Tutorials

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Reduce bounce rate in Google Analytics

For those who do not know yet, the bounce rate is a term used in web traffic analysis and it refers to users to enter your site and then “bounce” ( or leave the site). Bounce happens when a user is usually visiting only a single page and and then leaves your website, well nothing really wrong so far, right? I happen to do this a lot myself, I visit some sites for information I’m looking and then bookmark and then close the website. This in turn will tell any traffic analysis software that the user bounce, the software analysis, in this case Google Analytics, will track the visit with 0.00 time spent on website, although I did took my time reading it and understanding the article for at least 2 minutes. Basically this is not exactly right, since I did spent some 2 minutes reading it then bookmarking it, how to reduce bounce rate in Google Analytics?

A friend and co-worker pointed this new plugin for wordpress which is called:

http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/reduce-bounce-rate

Credit goes to http://solutionsfox.com for pointing this out for me.

Before enabling the plugin on my website, I had a bounce rate of 84.97%, this is horible, for everyone that do know, this is really really bad. After only 30 minutes of installing the plugin I had already started to have the value dropping to 79.27, see bellow screen:

Reduce bounce rate

Later update (24 hours):

I was completely stunned, the result is bellow:

Reduced bounce rate

And I still thought this was a bit strange and I checked the other option, which is Behavior / Engagement. This will let us see exactly how much time the visitor stayed on our pages (eg. didn’t bounced directly from our website), see bellow image:

Visitor engagement

So I have to say, this is really really impressive, since all my visits do come from Google searches, all visitors that came in are usually looking for specific information and they leave, so Google Analytics would not have count the proper time the user spent on my site.

Also, there is another plugin I believe similar to this one I mentioned above, I’m not sure how good this is since I haven’t tested it, but need to mention it at least since these are currently the only two plugins available for this:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/analytics-unbounce/

Now this I don’t believe its only limited to wordpress websites, any websites be it made in pure html, php or any other CMS, you can use the bellow code in your footer to reduce the bounce rate for your website, credit goes here to: http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/reduce-bounce-rate.

<!--Begin Real Time on Site and Bounce Rate -->
<script>
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
(function (tos) {
  window.setInterval(function () {
    tos = (function (t) {
      return t[0] == 50 ? (parseInt(t[1]) + 1) + ':00' : (t[1] || '0') + ':' + (parseInt(t[0]) + 10);
    })(tos.split(':').reverse());
    window.pageTracker ? pageTracker._trackEvent('Time', 'Log', tos) : _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Time', 'Log', tos]);
  }, 10000);
})('00');
</script>
<!--End Real Time on Site and Bounce Rate -->

var _gaq = _gaq || [];

(function (tos) {

window.setInterval(function () {

tos = (function (t) {

return t[0] == 50 ? (parseInt(t[1]) + 1) + ':00' : (t[1] || '0') + ':' + (parseInt(t[0]) + 10);

})(tos.split(':').reverse());

window.pageTracker ? pageTracker._trackEvent('Time', 'Log', tos) : _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Time', 'Log', tos]);

}, 10000);

})('00');

</script>

google analytics, page tracking event, reduce bounce rate

Reduce bounce rate in Google Analytics

Reduce bounce rate in Google Analytics

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