Smart decisions need smart data
The examples below relate to a single-page visit to a piece of content on your site. I am primarily concerned with organic search, but the approach outlined here works just as well with social or native traffic referrals. Here is what generally happens:- A user searches for a topic.
- The user clicks on an article on your site.
- The user spends a couple of minutes on your site and reads the whole article.
Understanding bounce rate
Here is Google’s definition of bounce rate:A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session. Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.These single-page sessions have a session duration of zero seconds since there are no subsequent hits after the first one that would let Analytics calculate the length of the session. Learn more about how session duration is calculated here. This means all of the following situations will be classified as a bounced visit:
- When a user clicks the back button.
- When a user closes the browser window or tab.
- When a user manually types a URL or search query into the browser bar.
- When a user clicks on an external link.
- Or when the session times out after 30 minutes.
Understanding time on page
The problem with time on page is that it does not apply to an exit page. So, where we have a single page visit which is common in content marketing, we have a single entrance and exit page. Google defines “Time on Page” as follows:Time (in seconds) users spent on a particular page, calculated by subtracting the initial view time for a particular page from the initial view time for a subsequent page. This metric does not apply to exit pages of the property. Time on page is calculated as the difference between the initiation of successive pageviews: pageview 3 – pageview 2 (14:31 – 14:02 = 00:29).What this is saying is that Google logs an initial view time for each page visited. Then, the time spent on page is calculated as the gap between the first-page view and the new page view. This approach does not apply to exit pages on your site.
The content analytics conundrum
When a user finds your content from a search query, reads every word in a five-minute session and then leaves, this is counted as a bounced visit with a zero-second duration. If you are trying to understand what content is engaging your readers, this is a big problem. Big. Conversions are generally what we all want here, but conversions follow engagement, which follows awareness. Without having good engagement metrics, we can make poor decisions. Without understanding the limitations of standard Google Analytic reporting for single visit sessions, we could make some terrible decisions. Fortunately, all is not lost. And, knowing that we have a problem we can look at ways to improve our reporting to better understand how our users engage with our content marketing efforts.Improving bounce rate reporting
There are a few solutions to improve your bounce rate reporting. If you are using the standard Universal Google Analytics code, you can add the following line to your tracking code: setTimeout(“ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘nobounce’, ’30_sec’)”, 30000); This will create an event after 30 seconds that will set this as a non-bounced visit. The exact time you use here will depend on what you want to classify as a bounce for your content. I tend to like the loose categorization of:- Bounce — Less than 15 seconds.
- Curious — 15 to 30 seconds.
- Browser — 30 to 60 seconds.
- Engaged — Over 60 seconds.
Improving time-on-page reporting
We can improve time on page reporting with a relatively simple trigger set up in Google Tag Manager. I am going to assume you have Google Analytics and Tag Manager installed. If not, you should, and you can find details on the Google Support site. 1. Create a trigger The first step is to create a trigger. This will be used to send the event at your preferred time interval.- Add Trigger. Set your trigger as the timer type (at the bottom of the list Other > Timer).
- Configure Trigger
- Event Name: You can leave this as default.
- Interval: This is the interval value in milliseconds. I tend to go with either 15000 or 30000 for 15 or 30 seconds respectively, but fine-tune to your needs.
- Limit: It is sensible to add a limit, or we can see artificially inflated values. I tend to cap this at around five minutes, so for the image example above, we have 20 instances of a 15-second timer.
- Create a Tag.
- Set the Tag type to Universal Analytics (assuming you are using UA).
- Fill out the Tag as follows:
Takeaways
There are a couple of things to remember here:- Standard bounce rate is not a good key performance indicator for content marketing.
- Time on site can’t be trusted for single-page or exit page visits.
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