0% Bounce Rate? Really?

You updated your website and your bounce rate dropped to zero percent or thereabouts - time to celebrate, right? Maybe.

Understanding Bounce Rates

Just a quick recap for the uninitiated - bounce rate represents the visitor who came to your site, looked at a single page and left without interacting with your website in any way. The goal of bounce rate is to count visitors who were so unimpressed that they didn't feel the need to find out any more about you or your company.

Reducing your bounce rate should be a good thing and generally is but be very suspicious of a bounce rate of zero or a drop so substantial to be practically zero if your pages never performed so well before.

Troubleshooting Bounce Rates

Note that I only said "be suspicious" and not reject them outright. All you need to do is to understand if there is anything artificially affecting your bounce rate. If you can prove that each page generates a single pageview in Google Analytics you can crack open the champagne and dance in the streets.

What are some of the factors that can lead to inflated bounce rates?

• AJAX tracking code. I've seen AJAX and jQuery code extensions that load content and send a trackpageview on document ready. In some cases if someone interacts with a dynamic section of your site, you want that interaction to be recorded as an interaction and not a bounce but if the trackPageview call occurs when the document has finished loading you'll see your average pageviews per visit jump to 2 or close to 2 for this reason. The first "hit" is real - the visitor was tracked with the normal tracking code at the end of your page. The second "hit" happened without the user touching their mouse or keyboard so you should take steps to disable this trackPageview in this instance. By all means track it if the user did something to make the content load though.
• iFrame content. If your page includes an iFrame showing content from another part of your site that also has the tracking code you will probably see similar symptoms to the AJAX description above of inflated pageviews per visit and decreased time on page to practically zero.
• Duplicate tracking code. This is probably the most common culprit I've seen. View the source code of one of your 0% bounce rate pages and search for ga.js and urchin.js in the code. Make sure you're viewing the source as displayed in your browser instead of the server side code because you'll be getting the exact picture of what is being sent to google vs. forgetting a file that get's included on the server side. To view the source code right click in some white space on the page you're testing and select view source from the popup. If you have one of each on the page or two of either with the same user account "UA-xxxxxxx-x" string you have a problem. In certain circumstances you might have two user accounts tracking a page but if you're reading this post, my guess is that you aren't at that point in your analytics sophistication!
• Third party vendor. Technically the same as a duplicate tracking code issue but slightly different. You might have a web page hosted on someone's platform like wordpress or site builder type setups. A common issue here is using built in Google Analytics tracking features provided by the vendor but using a designer's template that includes Google Analytics tracking too.

Tools of the Trade

If the tips above weren't enough to get you an answer there are a couple of tools you can use to see what is being sent to Google Analytics when your page loads

• Packet sniffers. These tools are fairly technical but your developers may be familiar with these kind of tools. They capture the web requests leaving your computer so you can review them and look for any traffic to _utm.gif. Wireshark and Ethereal are the most technical tools to use and not specifically dedicated to browser only traffic
• HTTP Proxies. Another technical tool you can change your browser settings to use an HTTP proxy that intercepts browser only traffic and will give you less background noise than a packet sniffer. I don't have any examples of these but someone in IT might be able to help
• Proxy Browser extensions. The tools I use most are browser extensions that listen to the traffic from your browser but don't require an IT degree to install and use. Firefox has LiveHTTPHeaders which works more like a proxy and shows you the traffic it is capturing. For Safari you can turn on the develop menu from the advanced preferences screen and look at the resources panel for your page looking for _utm.gif requests.
• Analytics Tools. If you are spending a lot of time on Analytics work for multiple clients or multiple internal sites, I recommend buying a copy of WASP, recently acquired by Avinash Kaushik's company (so it can only get better). As it is, it sits in Firefox in the corner and quietly reports the Analytics solutions deployed on your server including tracking mechanisms used by the advertisers if you have banners too. Click Google Analytics when you see it and it shows you the Google Analytics hits described in the most user friendly way to tell you what was sent to Google. It deconstructs the variables in a Google Analytics request to make it easier to read. If you see two tabs in the panel that pops up that both say Google Analytics you'll be able to see what is being sent. Looking at the trackPageview title should give you a clue as to what is being reported.

Still stuck?

If you're still stuck at this point, fear not! I've worked through many of these issues with my clients and I can help you get to the bottom of your issue and work with your developers to fix the problem. Send a request through our contact form and I will be in touch.