Increased bounce rate from Safari browsers

[#1]

We have seen a significant increase in bounce rate from Safari browsers, seems to be related to Safari’s ‘Top Sites’ page. A website that features in the Top Sites page gets visited even if the user does not actively visit the site. If the ‘Top Sites’ page is refreshed each website appearing will reload, in the case of our site this reload triggers an Omniture call – in many cases there will be no further activity on the site hence the increased bounce rate.

This appears to be an industry wide issue – various blogs describe the issue - the traffic appears to be identifiable from the HTTP Header: ‘X-Purpose: preview’- is there an agreed convention as to how to handle this traffic?

[#2]

You are correct that this is an industry-wide concern, since Safari executes JavaScript on the page as if it were a human user. I don't know that there is a universal answer to this question, but I can share with you something that a number of users have done.

In your page code, you can use something like the following code snippet to prevent an image request from occuring in Safari "Top Sites" mode:

// Stop Safari Top Sites requests from being sent
if(navigator && navigator.loadPurpose && navigator.loadPurpose == 'preview') {
                s.t=new Function("return ''");
}

This could go in your JavaScript (s_code.js) file just after the instantiation of the 's' (or similar) object. For example:

var s_account="your-rsid"
var s=s_gi(s_account)
 
// Stop Safari Top Sites requests from being sent
if(navigator && navigator.loadPurpose && navigator.loadPurpose == 'preview') {
      s.t=new Function("return ''");
}
/************************** CONFIG SECTION **************************/
/* You may add or alter any code config here. */
/* Conversion Config */
s.currencyCode="USD"

Hopefully that helps! I'll leave this idea open for a bit.