Google Analytics are lying!

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733 followers
Updated

Hello, everyone,

Here's is something that I have been suspecting for a while- Google Analytics reporting accuracy is not.

I've been wondering how the bounce rate is calculated and even asked questions here and there but all answers were uncertain. It seems that no one is sure how it works. Neither am I. But now I now that when it shows you your bounce rate is 100% I know it's a lie.

Today I did an experiment. I've visited a particular page from the computer that is not on my exclusion list and stayed on that page for about 10 minutes, scrolling down little by little. In a couple of hours, I've visited the different page performing the similar action.

When I went to GA later today, I could see me visiting these pages at the times accordingly. But it's shown me 00:00:00 time spent on the page! And 100% bounce rate!

There was a 2 hours time interval between these visits, so it couldn't be a momentary glitch.

I don't know, what you may think about it, but as far as I'm concerned, G's 100% bounce rate means 0 to me now (of course, I realize, that their opinion supersedes mine).

What do you think?

Kirill.

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Recent Comments

17

Thanks for your write up. Be blessed.

I think bounce rate is actually calculated more on the percentage of pages you visit on the site rather than how long you stay on a particular page.

Again don't worry too much about it especially not in the beginning, because fewer pages and a smaller blog site will always cause a high bounce rate no matter how good the quality is.

Thank you, Marie!

I'm with Paul. I check my page views and go back to work.

Page views is the main counter I check. But the bounce rate makes sense when you want to see your visitors reaction to your new post.

Right on buddy

I would not even bother with looking ate the crap just spend you time blogging and making your site look good and let the customers come

I didnt want to say that because I thought I might get shot ... but I agree wth you.

Not that I spend a lot of time monitoring it. But isn't everyone is saying that we should analyze the traffic :)?

yep, that is what people say to do... I still do it, but like you, Im not sure of the stats that i am getting at the moment. But you have got me playing around with GA today .. so that is a good thing !

As you can see, James, we're learning something every day :)

Hey Karill,
I know it is a bunch of hooey. I can tell by the "my stats: Feature on my profile page, my SumoMe stats, and the stats I get from my affiliates.
I take GA with a grain of salt.

Marty

I mean, since G is the one who decides, how to rank you, it is interesting, what they are basing their scores on.

I have been having trouble with GA for a while and take it as a guide only now. Doesn't seem consistent or accurate when you look at the results against your affiliate traffic results etc. I just figured I have not set it up right. Haven't really spent time to analyse it yet.

It would make more sense to have it working right out of the box :).

GA has never been totally accurate. It's a guesstimate at best. Which is why I have it filtered and also have another plugin monitoring activity on a few of my websites. Blogs are known to have higher bounce rates and Google does know this, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. But, even though GA isn't accurate, eventually you will gain enough traffic that it won't matter. :-)

I wouldn't care less about their inaccuracy, if they wouldn't be ones who are making decisions how to rank you. Still, the bounce rate could show me the quality of my posts, in a sort of way.

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