This will show you how to fix google analytics ‘bounce rate’ if you have a blog.
bounce rate is a tricky one – if you have an ecommerce site, then bounce is when people dont go to your checkout, or if they do go to your checkout then dont complete it.
for a blog its a different thing.
generally people will find your site and will read one page. then they will go away.
google counts this as a bounce because they dont go to more than one page, but if they have read your article then its not a bounce, thats what you need to fix.
once you have analytics installed on your blog and you can track visitors then you will notice that bounce rates are very high.
the way to fix this is:
at the very bottom of your footer code add the following javascript
setTimeout(
'_gaq.push(
[\'_trackEvent\',
\'NoBounce\',
\'Over 10 seconds\']
)',
10000
);
inside a script tag.
this will tell google after 10 seconds not to count the page as a bounce.
basically it will show bounces as ‘people who leave before ten seconds’ which is a much better and more meaningful metric for a blog.
Thank you very much! I was tired of getting all bounces for targetted informative pages, and I now use your script to get more meaningful information on my blog visits.
Does it have to be right at the bottom of the footer or can it be anywhere after the google analytics code? one more thing, great find!
it doesnt have to be right at the bottom of the footer, but putting it there means that its last to load, and also that its easy to find if you need to change it later :D