Solving the Low Bounce Rate Issue

Recently, I faced an issue with my company website's bounce rate in the Google Analytics tool. As you can see from the screenshot attached below, the bounce rate is extremely low.


Screenshot image1: 0.59% bounce rate for 1,064 pageviews is suspiciously low for this one page.

Screenshot image2: The 4.38% bounce rate for this entire website is way too low to be accurate.

In both screenshots, the bounce rates compared to the number of pageviews are suspicious. Low bounce rates for pages < 10 views would not be considered to be extremely suspicious. Pages that have a low bounce and have > 3000 pageviews is extremely unlikely. This would indicate that I have an issue.

I have analyzed and gathered our details:

  1. We are using Google Tag Manager and recently I migrated our existing site Google analytics tag by removing them from the website code and then added it within the Google Tag Manager interface.
  2. In Google Tag Manager, we have set up some event tags for Google Analytics (A conversion will be recorded when someone completes a contact form or if they click any of the links to email or call on the site), these events used to Goals in Google Analytics.
  3. I suspect that the low bounce rate is a result of using event tracking in GTM to track clicks on specific links such as email, phone number, and contact submit button.
  4. The bounce rate was normal when I first started using event tracking in July 2022, but it has been extremely low since September 2022.
  5. Checked the tags that are currently firing in GTM include GA Page view, GAds - Conversion linker, GA4 - Config & Page view, and Microsoft clarity official.

I started my investigation based on the information above and there could be a few technical reasons why this issue is occurring. Here are some possibilities in our scenario:

  • Two Google Analytics pageviews firing on the website page,
  • Or issue with event tracking in Google Tag Manager (i.e., tracking clicks on specific links).

First, I have checked the problem by reviewing the tags in GTM that is whether the Two Google Analytics pageviews firing on website or not, but there is no issue on this.
Second, Reviewed our Event tracking setup in GTM and identified in the "Non-Interaction Hit" field, I have selected "false".

This is the culprit of the issue. Immediately I changed the "Non-Interaction Hit" field from "False" to "True" for the Phone & Email tracking links clicks (but not for our webpage contact form submit event).

 

Screenshot image1: Before change the "Non-Interaction Hit" field.


Screenshot image2: After change the "Non-Interaction Hit" field
This tells GA that the event should not affect the bounce rate of the page, and will not be counted as a bounce.

Conclusion: The issue is now resolved.


By setting the email link click and phone number link click to "True" on Non-interactive hit in GTM, the bounce rate is back to normal percentage in Google Analytics.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How I Achieved First Page First Position for High Search Volume Keyword on Google SERP

Crawled - Currently Not Indexed

Crawled - Currently not indexed - My Experience Troubleshooting the Issue