Alright, so here is the case:
Traffic has been steady for last 7 days but a little bit drop on Friday for some beers I guess. However bounce rate couldn’t be flat as the matter of fact. So what’s happening to my site? Was it closed to the truth that relevant users have captured by our SEO/SEM efforts? Nah, there are 2 theories which seemed related to our analytic problem:
1. Many pageviews reloading on a specific page.
A visitor lands on a specific page and trigger a Google Analytics pageview, then somehow, another page view is fired from these possible techniques:
- A duplicate Google Analytics code
- Google Tag Manager installed while Google Analytics code is already there.
- iFrame content is embedded with a Analyics code which can fire a pageview.
Don’t get me wrong, You can still record data with multiple Google Analytics accounts (the UA-XXXXXX-X)
2. Event is recorded after a pageview.
Configuring custom event tracking improperly can result in wrong actions counting in turn against the bounce rate which is dropping it to zero or pulling it down unbelievable low.
This happens when a user enters your site, which first fires a pageview, THEN some action is taken on that page which fires an event. Some sample of actions we usually to ask:
- Pop up (or other conversion mechanism like proactive live chat) shows to user
- User scrolls down the page
- User hovers mouse over a button
- Social Media Engagement
If that Google Analytics event fires, it could count as an “engagement” – which means the user didn’t bounce.
Now, if it is an event that’s firing, you CAN tell that event to be a “non-engagement” event, which means it WILL NOT count against bounce rate.
So in our website, there were 2 Google Tag Manager pointing to 1 google analytic account
Now, you can come to your codie guru and have him sort it out immediately then let me know how high is your bounce rate :)
