Bouncerate

[cc976a]

Anyone seeing unusual patterns with their bounce rates on Google Analytics?

My bounce rate on one particular site has always been relatively high. Feedback from users on look, feel and relevance has always been positive. With 'undefined' organic keywords cropping up more and more in analytics, the data it's proving harder to use to see how people are finding you (without Adwords data of course).

The trouble is my bounce rate is definitely wrong. On average 30% of uniques are signing up and use the site (which takes them through a signup process), whereas each day Google Analytics shows my bounce rate between 90%-100%. I worry this high bounce rate Google detects is affecting my SERPS.

Anyone else seen any unusual patterns?

 

[Adam H]

Have you done a drill down on what content/pages is showing the high bounce rates ? That will generally tell you where the issue is.

I've been commissioned to audit a couple of sites recently which turned out to be hacked sites with injected SEO spam that had gone totally undetected, tell tail signs on the audit were analytics showing very high bounce rates or strange keywords showing up. Otherwise they wouldn't have found out it was there as their overall traffic hadnt changed and everything seemed all good and well, webmaster tools hadnt picked up a hacked site , nor had any browser checks.

Not saying that is the problem in your case, but always worth a look. The content drill down will help you see the biggest offending pages for that bounce rate, particularly handy with forums where you can see offending user generated content/threads and either improve the content and internal linking or redirect them to more relevant pages.

 

[cc976a]

It's the home page that is creating the bounce rates. It's an affiliate based site, and all though has good volume of content pages, the main traffic driver and high bounce rates are from the home page.

I have recently completely redesigned the site using Wordpress (from an old HTML based layout built a few years back) which hasn't changed the bounce rate. So the home page has completely different coding to what it did.

Thanks for the suggestion