INFOGRAPHIC: Bounce Rate Demystified

[christykunjumon]

[elan]

Hi Christy, i feel like this infographic is not as informative as it should be.

Clicking on a link to a page on a different website - This will not be considered as bounce rate if the external links are opening in a new window and thats the best practice to handle this. i dont agree with author on reducing the external links for lower bounce rate.

Session Timeout - The session time can be extended or reduced by customizing the cookie information.

Visit to your subdomain will count as the visitor leaving the website and thus it will be considered as bounce rate visit - Again this can be customized by sharing the cookie information for the main and subdomains.

I would say that 'Bounce rate' is highly flexible and it can be tailored to suit our needs.

Analytic Geeks - looking forward to your comments!

[christykunjumon]

Clicking on a link to a page on a different website - Here the author might be explaining about the ad's in form of pop-up or video, this might cause the visitor to quit or they may click & continue with the external link.

Example: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com
Yes, we can reduce this if the external links are opening in a new window.

Session Timeout - Yes we can alter this by using _setSessionCookieTimeout() but if I am correct this is just one of the factors which affect bounce rate. we can alter the values and by altering we get wrong data in analytics & I hope we don't need wrong data in analytics.

Visit to your subdomain will count as the visitor leaving the website and thus it will be considered as bounce rate visit - If we do proper CDT I hope we can correct this issue.

Yes Sir,to some extent we can alter bounce rate!

[ibrahim]

Yes Elan, Me too having the same concept regarding the first "one Clicking on a link to a page on a different website".

Also if we are using event tracking for external links then we have newly featured option Non-Interaction Events. For Example if we are tracking an external link as event then if we want to exclude this from bounce rate calculation simply set the Non-interaction(A Boolean that when set to true, indicates that the event hit will not be used in the bounce-rate calculation.)value as true.

Below is an example of event tracking snippets :

_trackEvent(category, action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)

I think if we are having so many external links then we can use this method as an alternate option.

2. Session Timeout

Here as Elan Mentioned we can customize the session time using the following codes.

_setSessionCookieTimeout()
_setSessionCookieTimeout(cookieTimeoutMillis)

3.Visit to your subdomain will count as the visitor leaving the website and thus it will be considered as bounce rate visit

Here I think we can use the sub-domain tracking/CDT as well..

[Mahesh]

"Bounce rate' is for sure highly flexible - for me Bounce rate is one of the most coolest qualifying metrics that helps to track the performance of the website. Lets take few cases - a highly paid PPC landing page will have high bounce rate, if a page is able to quickly able to answer a users query (1 page view) then there is high bounce rate similarly "session timeouts"- If a visitor spends more hours than the timeout period then walla there is high bounce again. Reducing external links, link to glossary page cannot be a complete solution, If the page is satisfying the visitors and getting good conversion rate + conversion value then we should not mind much about the bounce rate but still that depends from business to business and the website goals.

At times a shopping cart page which is not indexed or a website with deep web pages can have high bounce rates as well (Bookmarks, social influence) and analyzing this can help answer the valuable optimization questions. Session Timeouts, Cross Domain Tracking, events and virtual page tracking for external links/download files/comments etc can all help us get a more unaltered bounce calculation and this can for sure help refine the website tracking and performance evaluation. "Checking the tracking code" or "Analyzing entry pages", "Segmenting" can all provide more bounce rate insights to improve customer engagement tracking and time on site