: Analysing Bounce Rate and Time on Page I'm working on an eCommerce site and there's a perceived problem with the bounce rates on product pages. The best performing page (in terms of views),

@Mendez628

Based on my experience and my understanding of how javascript works, the Google Analytics code only records data related to the moment the user first loads the page and the javascript is run. So if a user only looks at one page, they would have a time on site of 00:00:00, regardless of how long they looked at a page. The GA code has no way of knowing when the visitor leaves.

Whenever I isolate my Analytics data to a short time period or other filter and I look at views of 1 visit and 1 visit/per page, the time on site is always 00:00:00. As a general rule, any condition that shows a bounce rate of 100% should also show a time on site of 00:00:00.

Of course, that means in general, the lower the bounce rate, the higher the time on site you will have, as you have fewer 0's bringing down the average. If you have pages with a high bounce rate and higher times on site, this suggests that the visitors that don't leave are averaging much higher page views. In other words, most visitors are leaving right away, but the ones that stay are staying very long.

To verify this, you can apply a filter in GA for Include > Bounce Rate > Less Than > 100. This will give you the true time on site for everyone that does not leave right away, and I suspect that if you compare your 80% bounce-rate pages with your 50-75% pages you will find higher times on site on your 80% pages. But there is no way in Google Analytics to view time on site for visitors who visit one page; they only bring down the average time on site for whatever section they belong to.

As to why this is happening on your site, I can only offer theories. Make sure you are filtering your own visits (usually by IP). I would only "worry" about the bounce rate in that if you can figure out why most of the visitors are leaving, you might be able to get them to stay. Compare the bounce rate by keyword; maybe you are accidentally ranking for non-targeted keywords and your bounce rate is high for those keywords, but lower (with lots of page views and time on site) for the keywords you want to rank for. It's possible that visitors are visiting the page and then leaving to compare prices, but there is no way to know. And I'm not aware of any data regarding sitelinks affecting bounce rate on eCommerce sites.

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@Nimeshi995

Remember bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who only visit one page on a site and leave. Make sure your stats are correct and that you aren't count moves to other pages on your site or the display of an off-site shopping cart or the like.

Also make sure that your stats are excluding traffic from 'bots and other automated sources. Some of my sites get a crazy bounce rate from 'bots and SEO/PPC spying software. I try to exclude or ignore these stats when I notice them.

The page view time indicates that visitors are hanging around and checking out the product in question. However, the real question is if the page is converting, is it leading to sales? If so, don't worry about the statistical anomaly too much. However, if it isn't converting well, then you may want to examine why this is (price, unclear purchase terms, page design, etc.)

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