Two Oddities in Google Analytics
I have a pretty good grip on how web stats work, and what metrics I should be paying attention to. However, I’ve observed a couple of peculiarities in the Google Analytics reports for iPhatigue.com:
IPhatigue is a one page site. The only links on the page go off the site. So:
- Why the huge difference between page views and visitors? Surely those numbers ought to be quite close together, unless 1 in 3 visitors is loading the page twice? That’s probably not happening, because 96% of visitors are unique.
- Google says that the bounce rate is “is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page)”. Shouldn’t that number be 100%, given that the site only has one page?
Do any of the stats-heads out there have some insight?
July 4th, 2007 at 7:07 am
I believe the issue is when people hit the page, hit the back button, and then somehow come back to the page again (read: definition of insanity). If it’s within the same “session” time, it wouldn’t count as a bounce because (1) the back button is not known as a bounce by google (as far as I know), and (2) when they hit your page again, it looks like they basically refreshed the page.
That would mean your average page views go up.
There’s probably a bunch of methods other than the back button which would do the same thing, but that’s the most common one I can think of right now.
July 4th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
I’m one of those people who’s probably had nearly 10 page views of your site within a couple of sessions, since I ended up showing it to anyone who popped by my desk.
Multiply that by a few other people doing the same, and you’ve got your result.
Also, the bounce rate probably only counts the % of people who leave within a certain timescale (ie. 30 seconds, 5 minutes or the 30 min session) but anyone who keeps it open in a tab until it times out appears to not have bounced.
That’s my theory anyways, all twopence worth of it.
July 4th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
[…] July 5th, 2007 Does anyone know what happened to the Wordpress Feedstats? In the spirit of Darren Barefoot’s recent post, I’m hoping our readers can help…Underneath the Dashboard, I used to be able to access […]
July 4th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
Wordpress discontinued the Feedstats.
But while I am here why does wordpress stat seem much higher than my sitemeter stats.
I added sitemeter to my blog,and I have always wondered why the different stats.Wordpress stats accessible from dashboard is often much higher than the sitemeter stats