: My application's bounce rate jumped from 30% to 80% overnight My application is provided as a service that is embedded in other sites. I have google analytics installed on the login popup dialog

@Moriarity557

Look at Content > Site Content > All Pages and then choose a secondary dimension of Network Domain. Apply an advanced filter, including bounce rate > 75%. If you try different filters to include specific pages one by one. Look at / and other high traffic pages, you may find something is scraping your page(s) a lot (and activating the JS) from the same domain and bouncing. Most bots are excluded because they don't activate JS, and therefore aren't polluting the data.

Bounces are hits that are "1 hit and quit", not coming from any referrer and not appearing to go to another page in 30 minutes. This behavior could also be someone visiting a lone bookmarked page, but a high bounce rate for one domain as a whole may indicate they are scraping or hitting your page to get something. If that same domain with the high bounce rate has a very low average time on site (less than 10 seconds), it is likely something automated is hitting your site.

If you look at the last month of traffic, you may have some higher pageview & high bounce-rate traffic, but you will likely notice some traffic that all seem to hit you exactly 52 or 30 times each. Those are not likely human visits. With such a dramatic change, you might find one or more domains hitting your site a lot, with a bounce rate of 95-100%.

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@Sue5673885

You could also check for double entries of the Google Analytics code. When this happens, GA tracks those pages as a page with zero bounce!

So if this was suddenly corrected, then that would explain the jump in bounce rate.

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@Sherry384

You should also check if for some reason your page load time increased. Every second of load time can increase bounce rate by as much as 20%. Users like fast pages.

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@Pierce454

If traffic is roughly the same and your bounce rate has shot up then I would strongly suspect it is due to the fact that your users are not being tracked correctly from page to page (or subdomain to subdomain / site to site etc).

Basically when the user is landing on your page if the user session is dropped from the previous page then analytics can't tie the full user path together and it appears like a high bounce rate. As far as analytics can figure out the user has bounced away as it has lost the user session tracking.

Have you looked at the number of new users visiting the site? Has this increased significantly? This can be a useful check particularly if the traffic has remained more or less constant.

To fully debug I would recommend the Google Analytics Debugger plugin for Chrome which will output the full Analytics requests to the debug console.

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