Reduce Blog Bounce Rate Drastically with a simple Tweak!

Few days ago, I found an article which was incredible, the article was mainly focusing about reducing bounce rate of blogs.I decided to give it a shot and surprisingly my blogs bounce rate has dropped from 70% to 40% in few days. I think it is a huge boost to my blog.

What is Bounce rate?

Are you new to blogging? Don't know about bounce rate? Don't worry its very easy to understand. When a visitor lands on one of your blog post and if he/she exit from your blog without viewing any other post other than the landing page from your blog, it is known as a "bounce". The ratio or percentage of Total page views is to bounce views (views which are considered as bounces) is called as "Bounce Rate".

Blogs like this one have high bounce rates because many visitors lands on one of the post of this blog, reads it and ones they are done, they'l exit from the blog. But the fact is, "Lower the bounce rate, better it is for the blog!"

One must keep in mind that the blog's bounce rate is also dependent on blog's niche. Google has stated that currently they are not considering bounce rate as a factor of rankings but they might include it in the future to identify and filter good and trusted websites. 

Tweak to Reduce Blog's Bounce Rate:

There are many ways to reduce bounce rates of blog like decreasing the reducing page loading time, inter linking blog posts etc. but, here i'm showing you a tweak to the Google Analytics code to reduce your blogs bounce rate dramatically.

Original Google Analytics Code looks like this:

If you have installed the Google Analytics code for tracking visitors of your blog, then your code should look something like this..

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);


  (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>

Modified Google Analytics Code:

Below is the tweaked code that would reduce blog bounce rate by 60 - 90%

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  setTimeout(function() {
    window.onscroll = function() {
      window.onscroll = null; // Only track the event once
      _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'scroll', 'read']);
    }
  }, 5000);

  (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>

Note: Just Change XXXXXX with your own Google Analytics ID that can be found in your original Tracking code.

Here's a screenshot of Analytics Report Before and After implementing the Tweak.

How the Original code works?

Original Google Analytics Tracking code, actually wait's until the second event is triggered by the user, that means unless a visitor clicks on any other page of your blog, the visit is considered as a bounce.

What have we done to the code?

We modified the code to reduce the bounce rate of blog. This tweaked code treats the page views as bounce only when a visitor leaves the blog/site within 5 first seconds. In the above code, we added a parameter to the code i.e. if a visitor scrolls down through the page then that visit is not considered as a bounce any more.

Conclusion

Google Analytics Official blog has stated that we can change the bounce rate of blog/website as required, so that we can analyze the performance of our blogs/sites. You can modify the above code by changing the delay time according to your own needs. 

Credits: The Tweaked code was given by from Drawingablank