3 Links: Zero Bounce Rate and 100 Percent Bounce Rate
Well, I have strong personal opinions about using “bounce rate”.
I have, in my entire working life, only seen two meaningfully actionable uses of this metric.
And, I will not mention how or who, as I might offend everyone else I worked with who has mentioned “bounce rate” to me.
Foot-in-mouth Moments with Bounce Rate
Well, recently, I had to investigate a particular scenario.
A situation where — one context of a page was causing 0% bounce rate; and the other context, 100%.
(I was figuring out a website userflow, to see if improvements needed to be done.)
So, first, I thought, “That’s simple enough — For context A, everyone was going to the next page; and for context B; everyone was leaving.”
Whot. What would even be making that happen?
Which led to my having to look through Google for potential explanations.
Which led me to understand that 0 and 100 are peculiar bounce rates to have. So, I am sharing that three most helpful links from my search.
- StackExchange Q&A about: Why does Google Analytics report 100% bounce rate when the page has lots of page views?
Particularly, response #2:
If your page links only to other web pages or to files on your own server, there will likely be a 100% bounce rate. If a user clicks to download a file, this isn’t tracked by default.
If ever it’s correct, as different websites have different explanations.
And this important quote from Google, in the same thread:
Bounce Rate for a page is based only on sessions that start with that page.
2. The much more confusing explanation in Analytics Ninja: Google Analytics Bounce Rate (actually) Demystified
Longer, much more detailed story of how bounce rate works. But, it’s still really useful because highlights a lot of watchouts you have to be wary / careful / concerned about on the coding end, that may be affecting the metrics.
3. The first answer on Quora’s “Why are some of my pages showing 0% bounce rate?”
Which includes a simple one-liner:
Because no external traffic is registered as landing there, or no one exits from the page.
And, of course, other coding-related reasons that could be causing it.
If these helped me, hope it helps others. If you know the answer, to my initial concern — feel free to tell me what I could have missed.
Originally published at www.angelaobias.com on March 18, 2016.
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