Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Fixing Bounce Rate between Domain and Subdomain
-
Currently, the way our site is set up, our clients generally visit our homepage and then login through a separate page that is a subdomain, or they can read our blog/support articles that are also on separate subdomains.
From my understanding, this can be counted as a bounce, and I know this sorta of site structure isn't ideal, but with our current dev resources and dependencies, fixing this isn't going to happen overnight.
Regardless, what would be the easiest way to implement this fix witihn the Google Analytics code?
EX: If someone visits our site at X.com, and then wants to login at portal.X.com, I don't want to count that as a bounce.
Any insight is appreciated!
Thanks
-
Hi Paul,
You're right - any click from X.com that takes someone directly to portal.X.com would indeed count as a bounce. There are a couple of ways you might proceed:
- Use Adjusted Bounce Rate
You can read this great post about adjusting your GA code to interpret users that spend a certain amount of time on a landing page as "engaged" and therefore not a bounce even if they click through to portal.X.com.
https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/adjusted-bounce-rate
This probably won't solve your problem if people are specifically coming to your site and immediately clicking through to the subdomain, but it might help if your blog posts are ranking and being considered bounces.
- Redirect Through An Intermediary Page
If you have the ability to create a page through which you can transfer any clicks, that would solve your problem. For example, you create a "placeholder" page and redirect it to your subdomain. You then make the "portal" link direct to the placeholder page.
In other words, the following would happen:
- User lands on Landing Page
- User clicks "Portal Page"
- User goes to placeholder page (considered "engaged" at this point)
- User redirected from placeholder page to portal
It's not the cleanest solution but it will accomplish what you are asking for. The placeholder page is just there to redirect the user, nothing else.
More important than these 2 strategies, however, is the question of why bounce rate is so important. Are you simply trying to differentiate your portal users from other traffic on your site? Are you worried about negative SEO impacts of having a higher bounce rate than usual? Or is it being used as a KPI of some sort?
Feel free to reach out any time and I will be happy to lend a hand if at all possible.
Cheers,
Rob
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
UTM tracking on a mapped subdomain, is it OK? (DA bonus question)
Hi, This is a technical question. OK, two technical questions. Please bear with me and I'll do my best to explain... We have a WordPress blog (business account, hosted by WordPress). We use it to blog and send traffic to our separate e-commerce site. We use UTM tracking to see which blog posts perform best. Our e-commerce site has a high domain authority. Our blog, not so much. In an effort to increase the domain authority of the blog we have mapped a subdomain of the e-commerce site to the Wordpress blog (still hosted by WordPress). Q1. Will this actually raise the blog's DA? If the blog does get a DA boost, I guess it'll be because Google now sees it as part of a powerful domain. But if it is technically part of the powerful domain... Q2. Should we remove the UTM parameters from the blog? I've read that you should never use UTM on internal links because it messes with your Google Analytics data. But I'm unsure if links on a mapped subdomain count as 'internal links'. Any help would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks in advance. J
Reporting & Analytics | | JabeKay0 -
Should I use sessions or unique visitors to work out my ecommerce conversion rate?
Hi all First question here but I've been lingering in the shadows for a while. As part of my companies digital marketing plan for the next financial year we are looking at benchmarking against certain KPIs. At the moment I simply report our conversion rate as Google Analytics displays it. I was incorrectly under the impression that it was reported as unique visits / total orders but I've now realised it's sessions / total orders. At my company we have quite a few repeat purchasers. So, is it best that we stick to the sessions / total orders conversion rate? My understanding is multiple sessions from the same visitor would all count towards this conversion rate and because we have repeat purchasers these wouldn't be captured under the unique visits / total orders method? It's almost as if every session we would have to consider that we have an opportunity to convert. The flip side of this is that on some of our higher margin products customers may visit multiple times before making a purchase. I should probably add that I'll be benchmarking data based on averages from the 1st April - 31st of March which is a financial year in the UK. The other KPI we will be benchmarking against is visitors. Should we change this to sessions if we will be benchmarking conversion rate using the sessions formula? This could help with continuity and could also help to reveal whether our planned content marketing efforts are engaging users. I hope this makes sense and thanks for reading and offering advice in advance. Joe
Reporting & Analytics | | joe-ainswoth1 -
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29\. We have been building good links from high DA pages and producing quality, regular content.
Hello, our domain authority dropped significantly overnight from 37 to 29. We have been building good links from high DA sites and producing regular, good quality content. Anyone able to offer any ideas why? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ProMOZ1231 -
Title Tag Capitalization Impact on SERP Rankings and Click Through Rates
My company made a branding decision to use lowercase for all of our title tags. This, of course, means that our titles on SERPs are all lower case. Overwhelmingly, it seems that websites use title case. This makes me wonder if we're shooting ourselves in the foot. Does using lower case titles negatively impact our rankings and/or click through rates? Is there any data out there suggesting that title case has a better click through rate than lower case? Thanks for reading!
Reporting & Analytics | | Solid_Gold0 -
Google Analytics and Bounce Rates Query - Should I block access from foreign countries ?
Hi , When I look at my google analytics for my UK Website, I can see alot of visits come from outside the UK , i.e Brazil and USA. Both of which give me almost 100% bounce rates from people visiting from there. I am wondering, if google looks at bounce rates with regards to ranking factors and should I therefore block access to my site from visitors outside the UK ?... Would this help increase my rankings ? Given that we only serve uk customers, I cant see any benefit of allowing non uk customers the ability to see the site . what does people think ? thanks pete
Reporting & Analytics | | PeteC121 -
Conversion Rate Question: Should I Measure Visits or Unique Visits?
When you measure conversion rates, is the equation: conversion rate = visits/conversions or conversion rate = unique visits/conversions I ask because it can actually make a pretty big difference in the conversion rate. For example, if you visit my ecommerce website 100 times before buying something (and assuming you're my only visitor), then my conversion rate is 100% _if I'm determining conversion rates by unique visits/conversions. _However, it's only 1% _if I'm determining conversion rates by visits/conversions. _Wow! Now this is clearly an extreme example, but it should serve to illustrate the point that in more reasonable cases, the way the data is measured can have a potentially significant impact on the conversion rate. Is there an industry standard for this? Am I missing something really basic? Also, here's a little bit of context for the question: I run an ecommerce website powered by the Magento CMS and I'm trying to measure my conversion rate in Google Analytics for individual products. Google Analytics shows me my site wide conversion rate, but apparently I have to do some customization in order to measure conversion rates on the product level. That's fine, but I want to make sure I'm measuring my product conversions in a standard way. Thanks for any and all help! Adam
Reporting & Analytics | | Adam-Perlman0 -
Google Analytics for multiple languages on multiple domains
Hi folks A quick question in regards to setting up Google Analytics for a website with multiple languages on multiple domains. The domains that needs to be tracked are: www.example.com -> English www.example.se -> Swedish www.example.dk -> Danish To my best knowledge this can be acheived in Google Analytids using 3 different setups: Different accounts Different properties Profiles What would you guys consider the best approach?
Reporting & Analytics | | Resultify
Pros and cons? Have a great day Fredrik0 -
Linking domains vs Inbound Links
Hello, Whats the diference between Linking domains and Inbound links in Open Site Explorer? And also with is most important to analyze? Tks in advance! Pedro Pereira
Reporting & Analytics | | PedroM18