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make Bounce Rate default metric

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Level 10

2/12/10

Currently Bounce Rate is only available as a calculated metric. By now this is a standard metric used across industries.

 

It should be a default metric that can be looked at on a page/segment/variable level as well as site-wide

31 Comments

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Level 4

9/23/10

I think it's really integral to provide the single access metric for keyword reports. I'd also like to see single access for the referring domains report.

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Level 10

9/23/10

Bret,

valid concern. We do have sites that are kind of single page landing pages, so an user that uses the RIA on that site and clicks an exit is not considered as a bounce on those kind of pages.

What about making a soft and hard bounce?

Hard bounce = user came, did nothing and left

Soft bounce = user came, just triggered link calls and left

 

//Andreas

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Employee

9/23/10

I hate the idea of adding so many options, but I recognize the need for them. Would you use one of these 90% of the time?

 

Bret

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Level 9

10/20/10

I agree - Hard Bounce is generally the strict definition of a bounce.  However, it sure would be nice to make Soft Bounce available as well.  Some sites demand this, for example -

 

A site which launches an Intro Video upon immediate landing. 

 

This site would have 0% Hard Bounce due to the landing page view s.t() tag being called with an s.media() video tag called immediately after.  However, the Soft Bounce would provide useful metrics to see if users are doing more than just landing and a video auto-starting.

 

Perhaps it'd be nice to have this as an option in the Admin Console.  Choose on a Report Suite by Report Suite basis whether to have a Bounce defined as a Hard or Soft Bounce.

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Employee

10/20/10

Excellent points, Eric. Pages that end up with zero bounce rate will quickly prove that hard bounce doesn't work. Sounds like the default should be a hard bounce, with an option to create a soft bounce metric.

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Level 2

1/5/11

I'd love to also be able to include a metric gauge with a "site bounce rate" into dashboards (yes, site bounce rates may not be an overall useful metric for most sites, but some of my clients have promotional microsites that it is useful for, and I'd like to be able to display it graphically as a gauge, similar to Page Views per Visit and Average Time Spent on Site).

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Employee

2/8/11

Question for everyone on this thread (and anyone else who cares to comment):

 

Based on the rough illustration below, and assuming that the Tracking Code persists across visits, would you agree or disagree that a bounce should be counted for the "Spring Promo" campaign on visit #2? Either way, please explain why or why not.

 

bounces.png

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Level 1

2/8/11

If I'm thinking of this correctly, I do think it's still a bounce in scenario #2....perhaps an even worse bounce!  The person in Visit 1 sees the page, doesn't bounce (?) and doesn't convert.  They come back again, and not only do they not convert, they now IMMEDIATELY leave (i.e. bounce).

 

So in this case, you're 0-for-2, with the second Visit having a worse outcome than the first visit!

 

Is that the question you are asking?

 

I think bounce rate shouldn't be complicated, because of the wide range of industries.  Not everyone is going to be doing cross-visit attribution/participation, so building in exceptions like these will make things more complicated than necessary.

 

Side comment:   One thing I would like to see is to be able to do is break-down bounce rate by page by time on page report.  Not sure if this is possible (since time on page is calculated as delta between two pages, right?), but by being able to do this type of report, you can infer the 'Avinash bounce' of 5 seconds or less instead of just "Single Page View Visit".  I'd like to report to management that of the 60% of people who bounce from a landing page, 10% leave after 5 seconds, but 30% stay 1-5 minutes.  That infers that the 30% aren't "puking" on the page, maybe we need to give them a better offer...and only 10% is the true "loss of opportunity"