Interesting bounce and page views data

[annafjmorris]

Hi, thought you guys might be interested in this:

From end of November, beginning of December our bounce rate fell a lot and our page views went up a lot - they actually switched over, this trend is a change to how it's been for as long as I remember.

I have been wracking my brains for what we did - we moved to thirty bees in early September and moved to a fast server at end of December - so neither exactly fit. We did get a small js issue fixed on our front page on about that date, but other than that, I have no idea!! We also did a lot of non-digital publicity where we had a blog page open for whole days, thought that could have distorted it, but the trend carried on well after that all ended. So, any thoughts as to the cause?

[annafjmorris]

Number of page views gone up clearly since switch to 30 bees. We also changed to show categories on home page rather than products, which I guess has a big impact

https://screenshots.firefox.com/b5A01WJOeiu3W596/gingerlingdesign.innocraft.cloud

[lesley]

Hmm, I wonder if it had to do with out new GA module. You are in the EU aren't you?

[annafjmorris]

yeah, but I didn't have GA enabled for that period

[lesley]

Oh, thats not it then.

[annafjmorris]

:)

[wakabayashi]

Its very hard, to find the reasons for better/worse results in SEO, Bounce Rates and so on. I would guess, that it's the better speed. Especially when you talk about Bounce Rate...

[DavidP]

@annafjmorris make sure you've only got one GA on your site, having two will give the exact scenario you describe of bounce rate down and page views up - because you're recording the data twice it's effectively not seen as a bounce. One guess is you created a new GA for your https rather than just changing the existing GA and then put the new one on your page? I've seen that done in the past on sites I've looked at.

It's difficult to see though with that image if that's the case or not as it's too zoomed out. If this isn't the case and there's only one GA then rather than looking at your overall bounce rate, try to narrow it down to pages, usually there'll be a few high traffic pages that are affecting the overall results rather than lots of low traffic pages.

[annafjmorris]

Hi David, it's actually Motamo (piwik) I was using, but I guess the same applies to that? I will take a look amd let you know

[annafjmorris]

Hi, that was the cause, here is a writeup http://www.gingerling.co.uk/troubleshooting-changes-in-analytics-bounce-rate-down-page-views-up-caused-by-second-motamo-google-tracking-code/

Thanks for your help david, let me know if you have a site I can link to from my post to give kudos