Being Creative with Google Analytics : Bounce Rate and Events

google analytics

Whether you are new to Google Analytics or need to use it for a while, there one key parameter that you need to understand before you can fully unleash the power of Google Analytics for you ad campaign, and it’s called “Bounce Rate”. In simple terms, Bounce Rate is the number of times a visitor clicked on your link, came to the page, did nothing and exited. Everyone hates a high “Bounce Rate”, its almost like a person entered your house, moved his head to look around and left, without speaking to interacting with anything else. A high bounce rate, reflect poorly on content, UI, targeting and sometimes even the product or service offering. And that’s why, mastering bounce rate is essential for good SEO and SEM management. Let’s dig deeper:

“Let’s say you are running a zoo and you need to generate visibility for XYZ zoo among different regions and increase footfalls at your zoo. You start promoting the zoo by building a website, let’s call it XYZ.com and start and ad campaign using Google Adwords. In Adwords you need to pay for per hit on the website. So when someone hits the link it makes you pay and you are hoping some reward against such hit. But then you realize that your website is showing 90% bounce rate and you have spent thousands of Rupees for such a campaign, it means that almost 90% of the money didn’t do anything for you. People click and exited. Devil isn’t it? You may curse your content or the UI or targeting. But before you start looking to stock more animals in the zoo, let’s take a look at the other side.”

It is extremely possible that bounce rate information is misgiving. It is there for Bounce rate need to be managed to provide qualitative reporting. For example
“XYZ resource page say ‘How to feed a Lion?’ The user visit your page stays in the page for nearly twenty minutes, makes a lot of note and exits the page. The user is student of high school and his teacher has given him the project report on Lion’s. So he gets the information what he needs and exits the page, but for Google Analytics such session was bounce rate and for you a bad information and certainly questions your content.”

There is no real direct way to capture such data but there is lot of way around to do such job. One way around is through element known as Event. The Event force the user to start interacting with you and create another session which is captured by Google Analytics. So you need to be imaginative and add certain events in the page or post that force or persuade to response the event. For Example
“You can add Video of Lion chasing the Deer or some other video related to lion, you can add outbound link for the interesting information about the lion. Our student would certainly be tempted to play the video and click the outbound link. This would create another session and you will realize your content is not worthless as felt before using Event.”

There are lots of way around and above example was one of them. It could trouble anyone and for that we “Capsicum Tech” are there to help you and save from your troubles.

But if you want to do it yourself, stay tuned and in next part we will tell you how to implement this Event and how capture such details in Google Analytics.