What is Bounce Rate? How to view it in Google Analytics Dashboard

So, on average each visitor spent one minute and twelve seconds per visit. Bounce rate. Bounce rate represents the number of people who visited the site, viewed one page and left. So, basically it’s the percentage of one page visit. Now, troyfawkes.com had 84.54{eea649be9b20682a45e14e059f7d304179b764c13e2b0eb817781d5b47685231} as bounce rate for the month of January and this could mean two things. myskywings.online

Either those 85{eea649be9b20682a45e14e059f7d304179b764c13e2b0eb817781d5b47685231} were very satisfied with the one page they viewed and they found exactly what they were looking for and they didn’t need to view any other page because they got the information they required so they came, viewed that page, got what they wanted and left or the page they viewed was of no use to them at all so they simply exited the site.

So it could really work two ways but generally a lower bounce rate is preferred. Now a similar term that is not included on the site is exit rate. Exit rate and bounce rate sound similar but they are different. Exit rate mainly applies to specific pages on your site and that is the exit pages. So the page that the viewer last viewed before leaving the site. So, they may or may not have landed on that page but that was the last page they viewed before leaving the site. So, that means that they may have viewed more than one page on the site before they left but the exit page was the last page they viewed.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics

And like bounce rate, high exit rates are not preferred but they are good for revealing problematic areas on your site. So, you should definitely have a look at your exit pages and see which areas on your website need improvement. And then the last term that we have here is percentage of new visits which is exactly what it sounds like. So, basically it means that 89.36{eea649be9b20682a45e14e059f7d304179b764c13e2b0eb817781d5b47685231} of the unique visitors in January were completely new people who had never visited the blog before.

And if you look to the right over here, you have a pie chart which represents new and returning visitors and according to it in the month of January there are approximately 11{eea649be9b20682a45e14e059f7d304179b764c13e2b0eb817781d5b47685231} returning visitors and 89{eea649be9b20682a45e14e059f7d304179b764c13e2b0eb817781d5b47685231} new visitors. It is always good to get new visitors but you do have to put an effort to have the old visitors coming back to your site again and again. And another term that isn’t showing over here, but I do want to talk about is unique page views. And yes, it is different from page views.

So, unique page views are actually a sub-set of page views. They are always going to be lower than the page views. And in the case of unique page views, each visitor is counted only once, regardless of how many pages he or she opened. And unique page views are mainly different from total page views because they eliminate multiple page views from the same person. So, if a person visits a site five times, it is counted as five page views but only one unique page view because all of them came from the same person.

And one thing that becomes a little confusing here is the difference between unique page views and unique visitors. A unique visitor is equivalent to a cookie in the browser. So, whenever you visit a website you get a cookie that stays in the browser until you delete it. So, if you visit a site twice and you delete the cookie after your first visit, your second visit will be counted as an entirely new visit. So you will be counted as two unique visitors.

So, it could be simply explained as unique visitors being how many different cookies have visited the site. Unique page views on the other hand are just unique visits to a page. So, numerous visits to a particular page are only counted as one unique page view. So, if I open a website the home page, click on a particular post and then go back to the home page, the home page did get two hits from me and it was opened twice and is counted as two page views but only one unique page view.

Another cool little trick that you could do here is click on any one of these terms and have the graph above represent it and completely change. So, if you want to have a look at unique visitors in depth, you just click on that and start analyzing. And as I mentioned earlier, you can view this hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and you can completely change the time range to anything that you like.

So, as you can see Google Analytics is very detailed. Below the graph and the terms that I just discussed there is some other information over here about demographics and languages. I am not going to get into that right now because it is also part of the standard reports on the side bar over here, so I am going to be discussing it in detail later. So, before I start with the side bar over here, I want to cover the tabs on top. So, right now we are in the reporting tab.

 

And then you choose one of the base line models. So, you have the option of linear, first interaction, last interaction, time decay and position based. In the linear attribution model each touch point in the conversion path shares equal credit for the sale. So if there is a conversion path with four channels, each channel will get credit for 25{eea649be9b20682a45e14e059f7d304179b764c13e2b0eb817781d5b47685231} of the conversion.

And this is the good way to evaluate the overall contribution of your channels. In the first interaction, the first touch point receives 100{eea649be9b20682a45e14e059f7d304179b764c13e2b0eb817781d5b47685231} of the credit for sale. And this is the great method for new companies who want to know how people find them the first time and convert. Last interaction model is the one in which the last touch point gets 100{eea649be9b20682a45e14e059f7d304179b764c13e2b0eb817781d5b47685231} of the credit for the sale. In the time decay model the touch points that are closest in time to the sale or conversion get the credit.

 

 

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