Planet13 - 6:46 pm on Nov 6, 2010 (gmt 0)

From October 19th / 20th, my bounce rated on my main ecommerce site dropped to only being about a third of what it was previously. Unfortunately, sales have been way down - maybe off by 30%.

Normal bounce rate on my site is about 65%. Has been that way forever.

Starting October 19th, bounce rate dropped to 39%

From October 20th up until November 5th, bounce rate has averaged about 24%

So basically, bounce rate is a third of what it was, with little changes to the site.

It appears that most of the other metrics only had slight variations when comparing October 19th to November 5th with the previous period of October 3rd to October 19th. for example:

Visits: UP 4.5%
Absolute Unique Visitors: UP 3%
Pageviews: UP 7%
Average Pageviews: UP 2.25%
Time on Site: UP 5.4%
New Visits DOWN 0.74%

REFERRALS

Direct Traffic UP 5.73%
Referring Sites UP 7.19%
Search Engines DOWN 2.72%

So New Visits and Search Engine referrals are down slightly, while other metrics are up slightly.

Anybody else seeing this? I am suspecting a GA glitch more than anything else. Otherwise, wouldn't Average pageviews and Time On site be much higher?