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Google describes it's bounce rate metric thusly:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.

My site is essentially a single page, with no outbound links. Why, then, is my bounce rate NOT 100%, in fact, it is roughly 60%!!

Mild Fuzz
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2 Answers2

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Google Analytics considers any session with more than 1 hit sent to its servers as a non-bounce visit; it doesn't distinguish between unique and non-unique pageviews.

Thus, if someone views your 1-page website twice (ie, refreshes the page, submits a form, etc); anything that triggers any pageviews or google analytics events, it will consider the visit a non-bounce visit.

That indicates that roughly 40% of your visitors are interacting with the site beyond a single pageview.

(If you were doing some sort of external link tracking, then people clicking the Twitter and Facebook links would send a second hit and would be treated as non-bouncers; however, this does not appear to be the case, so that is not the cause of the lower-than-expected bounce rate).

Yahel
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  • @yahelc I have a bounce-rate of 95% but 10% visitors are returning. Shouldn't the bounce-rate be 90%, if your answer is correct? – Tyilo Mar 22 '13 at 08:22
  • There's no relationship between bounce rate and whether or not someone is a returning visitor, @Tyilo. "Returning visitor" means they've had a visit in the past (say, 3 months ago). A non-bounce visit means their visit had more than one hit in it. All your data means, on a single page site, is "One in twenty of my visitors refreshed my page within their 30 minute visit. Unrelatedly, one in ten of my visitors had visited in the past." – Yahel Mar 22 '13 at 13:27
  • @yahelc You didn't mention 30 minutes before and I didn't know it. Thank you for the heads up. – Tyilo Mar 22 '13 at 13:53
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Our bounce rate went from 45% to 99% when we changed our landing page for one that looks like yours, we managed to get back to 50% after we changed the layout for something more simple, without jQuery show/hide divs. And you have 2 links facebook and twitter.

Murilo
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