Wouldn’t it be nice if by this time tomorrow your Google Analytics stats will show a significant improvement, literally overnight?
That’s entirely possible and it only takes a few lines of code in the right places to correct this. It shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to implement and the results will speak for themselves in 24 hours.
Let’s talk first why this small change has such a high impact…
The big flaw in Google Analytics
Google Analytics is flat out wrong when it comes to calculating bounce rate. If you have been relying heavily on this metric to analyze your content marketing performance, Analytics will not give you an accurate impression.
Your real bounce rate is much lower than they would have you believe, in most cases.
It all starts with the way Google calculates the time spent on site for your visitors, which they define as the time difference between the visitor first arriving on your page and the time until he or she bounces to another page on your website or back to the Google (if they came from a search engine query).
Here’s the big problem with that.
Suppose someone lands on your website, reads a long article for 40 minutes but then closes the browser tab or the browser window. You would expect to see in your Analytics that the visitor stayed on your website 40 minutes, don’t you? In this case, Analytics will register it as the visitor stayed 00:00:00 on your site. Basically, they would say he or she bounced immediately after visiting your site.
This is highly inaccurate and it could affect your overall statistics and your strategic decisions based on the performance of your website content.
Here’s my solution
Using Google’s Event Tracking API, you can force Analytics to update every 10 seconds and thus, making sure that the time spent on the site is accurately recorded.
To do this, you’re going to need to insert the small blurb of code below into your website:
<script language=”javascript”>
(function (tos) {
window.setInterval(function () {
tos = (function (t) {
return t[0] == 50 ? (parseInt(t[1]) + 1) + ‘:00’ : (t[1] || ‘0’) + ‘:’ +
(parseInt(t[0]) + 10);
})(tos.split(‘:’).reverse());
window.pageTracker ? pageTracker._trackEvent(‘Time’, ‘Log’, tos) :
_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent’, ‘Time’, ‘Log’, tos]);
}, 10000);
})(’00’);
</script>
How can I easily implement this?
If you’re using WordPress, once you’re logged in the WP Dashboard, hover your mouse over Appearance and click on Editor.
Scroll the left panel until you see footer.php and click on it.
Add the code right above the closing </body> tag:
Should you expect SEO benefits?
Within the SEO community, there are talks of improving your bounce rate to influence your SERPS. Will this small trick improve your visibility in the search engines?
I don’t have enough data to draw a definite conclusion. I would be inclined to say “No, not immediately”, but it could be used to improve your overall content marketing and even search engine results.
Here’s how…
Once you see which content on your website is truly captivating for your visitors, all you have to do is plug in links to this article from your lower performing articles. You would be, in effect, growing the link popularity of these articles, which will help with SEO and you would get people to stick longer on your website by directing people from low performing content to the best performing content.
Makes sense?
Give this a try and let me know in your comments how it worked out for you. And don’t forget to share it with any friends while you’re at it. Isn’t it time that everyone actually saw accurate statistics in their Analytics?
While I wish I came up with this, all credits for this weird trick go to Brian Cray, a kick ass software developer who first discovered the flaw in Analytics back in 2011.
Gabriel Cojocaru
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