Bounce Rate In Google Analytics

[bwnbwn]

Website in GA has a bounce rate of 85% time on site is 1.14 min. in Audience Overview.

In GA Behavior Site Content All Pages the average time on the page is 3.12 min. I looked at 1000 pages this average includes mobile.

To me this just doesn't make sense.

What is the difference in the two and why such a large difference in the two?

I thought the code might be corrupt so it was updated to the Universal GA code. Since the change this is the time I checked.

[samwest]

I run into absolute noise

So that would match my search results which are equally "noisy".

If you work at the Googleplex and know for sure, then please excuse my ignorance, but it does look like bounce and / or time on page is a metric they certainly do employ. Seems I've heard Cutts talk about it quite a bit.

[Robert Charlton]

samwest - I agree. I've seen some results sets where I've been convinced that time on page was a key ranking metric. That said, I've also felt that it was a niche-specific metric, not relevant for all types of sites.

I also agree with JD_Toims that bounce rate... at least by itself... is irrelevant with regard to rankings. But bounce-back to serps, in combination with "block domain", appears to have been taken as a strong signal by Google early on. We're no longer seeing the block domain option, so Google must have extracted what information it needed from that experiment. I'm not sure what might have differentiated that signal from the traditional bounce rate, which I completely agree is a noisy signal.

Additionally... back around June and July, 2012, we had a long discussion about exit rate, as distinguished from bounce rate, as a possible Panda metric. I definitely didn't agree with a lot of the thinking in that discussion, but the distinction between bounce by itself and other types of exiting might be worth revisiting...

Is Panda all about Exit Rate?
June - Aug 2012
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4469114.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[fom2001uk]

I see some people still going on about bounce rate so I thought I'd do a search on WebmasterWorld and found this thread. I've seen some crazy high bounce rates reported on GA which didn't make sense at all (and when you look at other metrics just don't correlate) so I believe like many do, that it is unreliable and too noisy. As for being a ranking factor, I just don't buy that at all. As Robert pointed out above, it is likely that SERP bounce rate is the signal that matters. That of course, is a completely different beast.