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Help on a Google Analytics topic - bounce and conversion
Yogo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hi all
Some of you might remember me making a post about BI/Big Data a couple of weeks ago. Long story short, I got an internship doing web/social media analytics and I have a question about Google Analytics.
The deal is this:
On a website where I am managing data, we want to lead the users away from the website over to other websites. We do this by having users click a button which displays three icons where bit.ly links have been embedded underneath. Users then click on one of these icons and a new page opens in a new tab. This action happens without changing the page (I assume it happens within an embedded flash object).
According to my understanding of Google Analytics, this would mean that users, who click on these links without having clicked on anything else before, would be considered to have bounced away (since we are leading them away from the site). This means that the stated bounce rate is wrong since % of users did actually do what we wanted them to. Thus the bounce rate would be lower than listed.
Since the users, who did the right thing, are included with all the users who didn't do the right thing, I set up an event tracking the clicks on these links. Thus far I have been able to calculate the true bounce rate by substracting the no. of bounced users with the amount of converted users and recalculating how many % the new number is of all sessions.
Thus far this has worked pretty well, but now I am in doubt if I am understanding my data corrrectly.
Today when I looked at the bounced session segment, the event tracker was 0 for users who clicked on the links. Which it shouldn't be if converted users are included in the overall bounce rate.
However if the act of opening a new page in a new tab doesn't constitute bouncing away from your website, then I have been calculating the true bounce rate completely wrong, and the data Google Analytics is showing me is right.
Question is if this is a case of Google Analytics using a default calculating method which doesn't account for certain types of data (for example, all "bounced" sessions are considered 00:00 in duration even if the user spends his time reading a blog and then clicking away).
If any of you have some clue or insight into what is up and down, I would appreciate it
Some of you might remember me making a post about BI/Big Data a couple of weeks ago. Long story short, I got an internship doing web/social media analytics and I have a question about Google Analytics.
The deal is this:
On a website where I am managing data, we want to lead the users away from the website over to other websites. We do this by having users click a button which displays three icons where bit.ly links have been embedded underneath. Users then click on one of these icons and a new page opens in a new tab. This action happens without changing the page (I assume it happens within an embedded flash object).
According to my understanding of Google Analytics, this would mean that users, who click on these links without having clicked on anything else before, would be considered to have bounced away (since we are leading them away from the site). This means that the stated bounce rate is wrong since % of users did actually do what we wanted them to. Thus the bounce rate would be lower than listed.
Since the users, who did the right thing, are included with all the users who didn't do the right thing, I set up an event tracking the clicks on these links. Thus far I have been able to calculate the true bounce rate by substracting the no. of bounced users with the amount of converted users and recalculating how many % the new number is of all sessions.
Thus far this has worked pretty well, but now I am in doubt if I am understanding my data corrrectly.
Today when I looked at the bounced session segment, the event tracker was 0 for users who clicked on the links. Which it shouldn't be if converted users are included in the overall bounce rate.
However if the act of opening a new page in a new tab doesn't constitute bouncing away from your website, then I have been calculating the true bounce rate completely wrong, and the data Google Analytics is showing me is right.
Question is if this is a case of Google Analytics using a default calculating method which doesn't account for certain types of data (for example, all "bounced" sessions are considered 00:00 in duration even if the user spends his time reading a blog and then clicking away).
If any of you have some clue or insight into what is up and down, I would appreciate it
Yogo on
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I've made this mistake myself. After publishing a proud blog post about how my redesign (which included some expand / hide events I was tracking in GA) had drastically lowered my bouncerate! *facepalm*
Awesome android RPGs are made by my friends; check them out.
Cause I have seen examples on the net where users accidentally created an event and got a zero bounce rate. The solution was to flag the event as non-interactive.
Awesome android RPGs are made by my friends; check them out.
I wouldn't be able to say since I am not the one setting up the tracking. I just read the data gathered
From what I can see of the data gathered, it looks like the event is interactive though I can't trace it specifically in the website code (website is outsourced to an external freelancer who does the coding).
Based on this, I think I can conclude that I calculated the bounce rate incorrectly to begin with. It just is that high because users either 1) don't find our content interesting or 2) they only read our content, but don't click on anything afterwards.
In any case, I have asked our freelancer to elaborate how he sets up the tracking, so I can understand the foundation of the data.
Thanks for the help