During a recent meetup which focussed on Google Analytics the subject of Bounce Rates came up. It was suggested that they were not applicable for sites that were only ever likely to have 1 page view per visit. This might be true by default but by editing the analytics script just a little you can set a time limit on what should be considered a bounce.
Lets say for example you only want to identify anyone who spends less than 20 seconds on a page a ‘bouncer’. All we have to do is include the following line in our analytics -
setTimeout("_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', '20-seconds', 'read'])",20000);
so your full code would look like the following (insert you own UA code where appropriate).
<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
setTimeout("_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Longer than 20-seconds', 'read'])",20000);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
// ]]></script>
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
setTimeout("_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Longer than 20-seconds', 'read'])",20000);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
// ]]></script>
For more information see Google’s related blogpost.
And if you need any help applying to your website get in touch.