For some reason everybody (or at least most webmasters) is looking for ways to improve bounce rate—make people visit more pages on their websites. I hate when I am looking for some information and I am forced to click here or there for more information. I love to have everything in one place, and I try to blog in the same way. If somebody came to my website, (s)he should find everything on the landing page.
But there is a problem with such an approach. I am losing data about how much time people spend on my site. It will show 0 values if a visitor comes to my site, reads content, and presses the back button, as Google Analytics won’t record this event.
I thought I couldn’t do much with this, but then I found this post about how to improve bounce rate. For me it was a solution to get proper visit duration statistics. It works only with Google Analytics, but that is enough for me.
The implementation is very simple. You can follow the instructions provided in the above post, or you can use this WordPress plugin.
You will see the impact the next morning. I added this script to my site on the 5th of November, and you can see how the bounce rate and average visit duration changed on the next day.
Average visit duration went up to 18 minutes from 1 minute, and the bounce rate went down to 8% from 86%. Don’t you like it? Personally, I love such improvement, and you need just a couple of minutes to deploy it on your website.
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