Two of the most important web analytics KPIs are average time on page and bounce rate. They are pivotal in understanding how visitors use a website and whether they value what they find on those pages. Google Analytics (GA), as the world’s most widely used web analytics platform, presents a very easy implementation that helps you quickly set up tracking and collect data. Its default implementation runs on a simple understanding of time and bounce that works fine for simple websites. However, for anything more sophisticated, we at Pace advise a more evolved approach.
In the past, we have discussed how the default time measurement of GA provides limited (and in some cases, misleading) information about time spent by visitors on a page (A New Approach to the Average Time on Page in Google Analytics). We have also touched upon how custom tracking events influence time measurement. In this post, we will go over these custom tracking events in more detail and explain their impact on bounce rates.