bounce rate

suddenly up

[specter]

hello,

I'm having a sudden increase of the bounce rate on my web site, and consequentially average time on site gone significantly down.
I didn't make any change...
what could this mean?

thanks

[Receptional]

Check your site has not got hacked.

It is possible that people are bain redirected to another site.

It is apparently becoming quite a problem.

[specter]

well,

I visited the site by myself and all appears right.
Today a further fall...
average time is decreasing vertically, only few seconds...bounce rate passed from 60% to 85% i just a couple of days.
The site is ok...I don't understand, really...
some kind of analytycs bug?

[dickbaker]

Receptional, how would a person tell if his site had been hacked? If GA shows one bounce rate and the log stats program shows another, is there any reason to think GA would be more accurate?

I'm also seeing numbers that don't make sense.

[bartn]

I'm having similar problems. My bounce rate for my most important pages/keywords are usually around 100%. Less important pages between 50-75%.

Then in September, my site got hacked with the Wordpress worm. Suddenly, the bounce rates reversed: Bounce rates of my most important pages were in the 50% range and resulted in many sales. As soon as I discovered the Wordpress hack, I removed it and bounce rates returned to what they were.

I went through every file of my site and I was unable to find what's causing this. I suspect that what is happening, is either a re-direct (or traffic hijacking) or fake scare-ware messages being displayed to customers/visitors. I still haven't been able to figure out if this kind of attack comes from a compromised account on my webhost or from a more external source.

The first thing you should do, is verify that your site is clean. This can be done by going to the unmaskparasites website. You should also check the uptime of your server.

[bartn]

Regarding the issue above, I have also checked for DNS cache poisoning, but haven't found any evidence for that (so far).

The strange thing is, that I see relatively more traffic coming from foreign Google sites than from Google.com. My "inner" pages have lost all PR, but my check-out pages have a PR of 2, while I do not allow indexing of my shopping cart pages (thru robots.txt).

[Receptional]

Note also this post that came in via Dickbaker:

For the past week to ten days, I've been seeing some numbers in Google Analytics that have me really perplexed. GA is showing a decline in page views, views per visit, time per visit, and a drastic increase in the bounce rate.

I looked into data for the individual pages, and it didn't make sense. For example, one page would get 100 visitors. GA said the bounce rate for the page was 100%, yet the exit percentage was 28%. When I did an overlay of the page, I'd find that 38% of visitors to that page clicked on one link to another page on my site, and 20% clicked on a different link to another page.

I then checked several pages that were reported to have 100% bounce rates, and nearly all had the same pattern as above.

How can this be? Or is there some kind of error on my part or on the part of GA?

Thanks for any replies.

[bartn]

I just ran a "traceroute" test at "dnsqueries" and it took 39 hops to get to my site. I'm on the East Coast, my server is in California and the trace goes to France, the UK, Germany, Italy and then finally back to the US through TX onto California. I think this is kind of strange. There is also a jump in time (in msec) between the trace in Europe and the trace in Texas.

I lowered the TTL time on my DNS settings yesterday and it has helped somewhat, in the sense that I finally receive some email opt-ins (but still no customer orders).

[dickbaker]

While searching for information about Google Analytics and bounce rates, I came across an additional piece of code for the GA script that makes GA only count a page view as a bounce if the visitor only went to one page and stayed on that page for less than 10 seconds.

The extra line of code is the timeout, positioned as follows:

pageTracker._trackPageview();
setTimeout('pageTracker._trackEvent(\'NoBounce\', \'NoBounce\', \'Over 10 seconds\')',10000);
} catch(err) {}</script>

[shorg]

Hi,
i see this topic has been dead for a while now. Anyone managed to figure out what's behind the weird stats results? I'm experiencing the same issue, got a few startup sites, with an average of 35-40 hits a day, about dec.10 this suddenly dropped to almost 0. At least according to Analytics. My server stats say otherwise.
Did the google dudes do some substantial change to the algorithm?

[bartn]

This is what I would like to find out:

-When you're talking about bounce rate being up, is that for EVERY page or just for particular pages?

-Besides bounce rate being up, has anyone noticed a decrease in ACTIONS (e.g. email sign-ups, sales etc.)?

I have searched my server for anything that could compromise the website, such as iframes, obfuscated Javascripts, etc. I have also run a clamscan and nothing was found. (This doesn't mean that there isn't anything on my server, I'm not a linux expert).

Is it possible that the Google Analytics code has nothing to do with this and that this is some sort of hack or black hat seo technique (done by competitors) that is somehow interfering with your website?

If people reading this thread could leave more specifics about their experience with this, it would be truly appreciated.