The bounce rate is the number of web sessions where the user left your site after viewing just one page. It is a key measure for landing page engagement. This is the second article in the Q&A series. As I previous mentioned, I am going to continue answering some of the most-asked questions about Google Analytics and how it works. If you want to get an idea of how this works, you can visit PART 1(Pros and cons of using Google Analytics) of the series and see what questions we answered there. Here are the questions we will be tackling in this second article of the series: 1) What is the bounce rate in Google Analytics? 2) How is the Bounce rate calculated? 3) What is an ideal bounce rate? 1) What is the bounce rate in Google Analytics? The definition of the Bounce Rate as shown in the Google Analytics Help Centre is “the percentage of single-page sessions. Those are sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with any other page”. Why is this metric important? A high bounce rate shows you may have some problems on your website. Remember that the bounce rate is correlated to the content of your website and should be considered in the context of the purpose of the website. If you have a content website, a services website or an ecommerce website you need to look at the bounce rate in the big picture and analyse it using Advanced Segments to look at a specific category of pages, and see how they’re performing vs other sections. Some reasons for a high bounce rate are: Single page website: where the user never leaves the first page through their whole visit. A high bounce rate, in this case, is actually irrelevant: you should focus on how many visitors. In order to find out how people interact with your website, you can track Custom Events on the page. To get an accurate bounce rate in this case you need to set up the events as "interaction hits". Incorrect implementation: for a multiple page website, in order to track all the pages, you need to add a specific tracking code on all of the pages for a correct read of the data. In case the bounce rate is high, that might show that the tracking code is not correctly applied to all pages of the website. User Behaviour: the people that arrived on your site and left without doing anything else, either because they found the information that they wanted on that page and there was no need to access other pages or they simply entered by accident and didn’t find what they needed. Also if a user has a page bookmarked, enters the page and then leaves, that’s also counted as a bounce. Site design: when the implementation is done properly then you really might have a problem with the way the content is displayed. In this case consider looking at the landing pages, as they might not do justice to the content. Also, the keywords or ads that you use, might not reflect the content of your website and because of that, you need to optimise either the content or the keywords and ads. 2) How is the Bounce rate calculated? In Google Analytics, there are two indicators for the Bounce Rate. There is the Bounce Rate of a Web Page and then there is the Bounce Rate of a Website. The Bounce Rate of a Website is the total number of bounces across all of the pages on the website over the total number of entrances across all the pages on the website (both over the same determined period of time). This is represented in Google Analytics as a percentage shown in the table of all the pages displayed. The Bounce Rate of a Web Page is the total number of bounces on a page over the total number of entrances on the page (Both over the same determined period of time). The image above shows the equation for calculating it. This is also represented as a percentage but it is shown in the table for each page separately. Here is an article from OptimizeSMART in which they show us how to improve our bounce rate. 3) What is an ideal bounce rate? As I previously explained, the bounce rate should be as low as possible. In one of his articles, Avinash Kaushik who is a guru of Analytics tells us what the ideal bounce rate should be: “As a benchmark from my own personal experience over the years, it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20%. Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying.” To recap, in this article we managed to see what the Bounce Rate is, how it’s calculated and what is the ideal bounce rate we should strive for with our website. Make sure to check part 3 out, in which we will answer more questions about Google Analytics. Happy Reporting. Get Social! Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and keep up-to-date with our Google Analytics insights.

We've decided to start a series of content to answer basic questions you may have regarding Google Analytics. These are readily available but sometimes over complicated and we're experts at both analytics and making things simple. Hopefully, these blog posts will help clarify any questions you may have. In Part 1, we will be discussing: When to use Analytics? Pros and cons of using Google Analytics. 1. When to use Analytics? These days, everything on the internet is connected. Have you ever questioned how websites know your location and redirect you to the page of that specific location? Or have you ever seen those ads that appear all the time after you visit a specific website? That’s due to cookies, which are a set of parameters that get collected and interpreted. They are part of Digital Analytics or Google Analytics, which is a set of measurements that helps you in understanding which people you reach with your website and how your website performs. By performance, we refer to who is visiting your website, how someone interacts with your website, the decisions they take following those interactions and much more. Ultimately, you want to use Google Analytics whether you own a website, you're an online shop or if you are a marketer, in order to increase the marketing and sales efforts of the platforms you are using. If you are still not convinced that Analytics is a must have for an online property, check this article from AnalyticsNinja and you'll get an even deeper dive into why you should you use Analytics. [subscribe heading="Get the Littledata app" button_text="Free Google Analytics Audit"] 2. Pros and cons of using Google Analytics: Google Analytics is one of the most known and used tools to track Digital Analytics. There are definitely a lot of pros to using it but there are also some drawbacks. Pros: It’s free of charge so everyone can use it. You can use it on different digital environments such as websites, mobile applications, kiosks, or anything that has an internet connection There's a Google Analytics Academy, where you can get in-depth information and get educated about how to use it. You can connect your Google Analytics account with your AdWords account. You can also collect data from different platforms and sources. You can create custom goals and you can also track your ecommerce platform. You can create custom reports based on your needs. This way you can track specific information depending on your industry. The cons: In order to understand all the intricacies, you need to learn. The issue with that is that the information is sometimes hard to find, may be confusing, and overwhelming. The academy is also quite time-consuming so if you're on a time frame, it my not be feasible. The overall feel of the platform might also be a little bit overwhelming. There are too many dashboards and too many things to look at. The free version of Google Analytics suit almost anyone, but if your traffic is high and you'd like to upgrade to Premium, the price is $150,000. Another great article on this matter is written by the guys at Eethuu. Hopefully, this has helped give you more insights into Google Analytics! If you'd like more information or have any questions, get in touch. Check out Part 2(What is the bounce rate in Google Analytics) of the series!   Get Social! Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and keep up-to-date with our Google Analytics insights.

Google Analytics is a free Web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for search engine optimisation (SEO) and marketing purposes. The service is available to anyone with a Google account. As a person that’s at the beginning and trying to get familiar with the field of analytics and data, it’s definitely important to understand how Google Analytics works. There are four components that come together and make Google Analytics work: 1. Collection 2. Processing 3. Configuration 4. Reporting Collection: Data can be collected from different sources, such as a website, a mobile application or pretty much any device that has a connection to the internet. For a website, in order to collect the information, we need to include a Tracking code (JavaScript). This code should be included on every single page of the website in order for Google Analytics to capture the information properly. The JavaScript that we get from Google is okay, but don’t forget that it tracks a limited amount of information. If you are active in a niche field of work, you might want to take a look at adapting that code in order to track the correct data. For a mobile application, we need to use a specific software development kit (SDK), depending on the operating system. In this case, activities will be tracked instead of pageviews. Because we might not always have an internet connection available, the hits will be stored and sent to afterwards to Google’s collection centres. Processing + Configuration: The processing step is the one that takes the longest to finish. It can take anywhere up to 4 hours (24 hours in Google's T&Cs) to turn all the raw data into reports that you are able to interpret and monitor. This doesn’t happen easily, but the only way you can skip the queue is by paying for Google Analytics 360. In Google Analytics, the configuration part comes in and it applies certain filters to the data that is collected. While some of those filters (new or returning users, linking between pages and time spent on certain pages) are pre-configured, you also have the possibility to apply some filters of your own to this process. Remember that you will not be able to change that information once it is stored in the database. Reporting: The final step what the users get to see. By using Google Analytics' own interface, you have access to all the processed information and this is the place where you can manage it from. There is also the possibility of using different applications by creating a custom code in the reporting API. Here is a short list of benefits that you will gain after using Google Analytics: 1. Visitor Segmentation: New vs Returning users, Geographical location and referral source. 2. Page visits: Finding out which pages are the most visited. 3. Locating the website: Finding out how the users got to your website and tracking the keywords they used. 4. Website optimization If you'd like some more information, please get in touch or leave a comment below! Get Social! Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and keep up-to-date with our Google Analytics insights.