Do You Measure “True Bounce Rate”?
The trouble with blogs and other sites that offer up quick and pointed content to visitors, is that often times, readers arrive and spend minutes worth of engaged time reading your posts, but they bounce from your site after a single pageview. One potential way of solving this is by changing how your bouncerate is calculated.
Normal definition of bounce rate:
Any visit that only views one page in a session.
Proposed definition of bounce rate:
Any visit that spends less than 10 seconds on the one page they view in a session.
Personally, I don’t agree that the way bouncerate is calculated should be changed, just because it’s a blog. For one, it makes the definition ambiguous and secondly, if you are a blog owner, you certainly want the visitor to engage with your content deeper - by viewing more content, subscribing, commenting or connecting with you through social networking (at least that’s what I measure). However, if you’re going to do this, you probably don’t want to do anything that will compromise the integrity of your Analytics data.
Normally, to change your bounce rate, it’s as simple as firing an event after 10 seconds. This is troublesome because events can’t be filtered out of your data, and you’re left with data that could be inconsistent or meaningless for you. On the other hand, if you can find a way to use this data to improve your site in some way, then by all means, it’s probably worthwhile.
How to Measure “True Bounce Rate” Without Permanently Altering Your Analytics
Rather than use events that can’t be filtered out of reports, use virtual pageviews like so:
setTimeout('_gaq.push([\'_trackPageview\', \'/virtual/after-10-seconds\'])',10000);
Then, go into your Google Analytics and setup an Exclude filter to remove this Request URI from entering any profiles you don’t want altered permanently. Sure your pages/visit and clickstream will be changed in the affected profiles, but at least the profiles you filter the virtual pageviews out from will contain accurate data with the right bounce rate metric.
Is this useful?
Beyond a couple of very specific circumstances (i.e. when spending time on a page equates to revenue in the form of ad impressions or for some brand engagement metric), I can’t see how useful this would be, considering there are many more useful metrics to determine engagement, without manipulating the bounce rate.
When do you think this could be useful?
Rob,
I’ve never checked to see how this works in practice before, you can probably shine a little light on it.
If you use events or virtual pageviews to track ‘other’ activity that isn’t the actual page itself - it messes with your bounce rate metrics since the presence of either an event or additional pageview means that you’ve generated two interactions with Google Analytics - thus not a bounce.
That change will show up in your base Google Analytics profile, however I wasn’t aware that you could filter that out with a related profile and not have it have an effect on that data as well.
As a matter of interest, what sort of change do you see in effective bounce rate between the base profile & the 10-second profile on the sites you’ve implemented that on?
Al.
I haven’t implemented it on any sites yet but I’d imagine blogs (which typically have higher bounce rates) would have a huge impact on bounce rate. A workmate implemented it on his blog though and saw his bounce rate drop from 75 percent to 30 percent.
As long as you use virtual pageviews, you’ll be able to filter that out of reports…
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