It’s what every site owner and Google Analytics user wants – a low bounce rate. This means your SEO strategy is working and users are consuming content beyond their initial landing page. But, what if your bounce rate drops suddenly and unexpectedly?
Step One – Be Sure It’s An Error
Though it may seem unlikely, there may be a perfectly valid reason for a dip in your bounce rate. A piece of content may have gone viral or been featured on another site.
Check your Channel traffic (Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels), and compare the time window for the bounce rate drop to a previous time and check for any strange swings.
You may have to dig in deep to see specifics, but you should notice right away if your Channels is of an increased threshold, and this will give you starting point to dig from.
Step Two – Is An Event Affecting Bounce Rate?
OK, so your Channels are pretty normal. The next step is to take a look at your on-page Google Analytics tracking code to see if one of the following is wrong.
Events Affecting Bounce Rate
Is there an event misconfigured with a “non-interaction” hit? By default, events are considered “interactive”, which means that when the event is sent, it will affect your bounce rate. Check any recent event tracking to see if they are sending bad non-interaction events.
Bounce Rate Affected:
ga('send', 'event', 'category', 'action');ga('send', 'event', 'category', 'action', {'nonInteraction': 0});Bounce Rate Unaffected
ga('send', 'event', 'category', 'action', {'nonInteraction': 1});Step 3 – Are Page Views Being Sent Twice?
Occasionally, I’ve seen this occur – the page is sending the “page view” portion of the script twice. This would double the page views for a single page view, and conversely, affect bounce rates.
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXX-X', 'auto');
ga('send','pageview');
...
...
ga('send','pageview');
Step 4 – Look For Variants Of The Above Steps
Most of the time, it’s one of these three items that’s causing bounce rate interference. Even if you’re sure it’s not one of these two directly on a page, there may be version of it.
For example, a client added a scroll depth plugin to their site. The plugin sends the data back to Google Analytics via Events. Sure enough, the new plugin was sending the event tracking as an interaction event, so anytime someone scrolled the page, an event was sent that would drop the bounce rate. Once that was adjusted, the bounce rate returned to normal. So while no active development took place, a plugin was added that mucked things up.
Summary & Takeaway
Bounce rate is an important metric, and keeping tabs on it is important to measure and monitor a site’s health. Seeing a sudden drop is cause for concern, and usually all that’s needed is some good research to find the page or pages that have issues.
