[Forum] Very HIGH Bounce Rate since VB4 upgrade

[satlazone]

hi there
look at this:
http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/4952/28423837.png

it happened since I have upgraded my vbulletin from vb3.8.4 to vb4
what the hell is this?
My Pages per visit dropped from 3.2 to 2.1
My Bounce Rate jumped from 40% to 70% !!!

what's going on why is this I really don't have any clue !!

[Zachery]

Bounce rate of?

[David Copeland]

hi there
look at this:
http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/4952/28423837.png

it happened since I have upgraded my vbulletin from vb3.8.4 to vb4
what the hell is this?
My Pages per visit dropped from 3.2 to 2.1
My Bounce Rate jumped from 40% to 70% !!!

what's going on why is this I really don't have any clue !!

We experienced a big jump in bounce rates too when we upgraded.

I suggest if you carefully read the bounce messages to determine what exactly the bounces are saying. We found that 80% of the bounces were from Yahoo claiming that they were returning our emails because of concerns over potential spam. Most of the bounces give a postmaster link to appeal. We went through the appeal process and were unblocked by Yahoo and a few others.

So why did this happen? In the admin section there is an area for EMAIL OPTIONS, including setting up SMTP Username and SMTP Password, which is tied the the official BOUNCE EMAIL address you list. By setting this up with VB4, we are better able to certify with ISPs (Yahoo and others) that our emails are legit.

Another cause for rejection is potential mismatches found under your domain search at http://www.intodns.com or checking your IP address for blacklisting at http://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

There are MANY causes for bounces, most of which should only be your member's email box being out of service and NOT being blocked.

Where to start? By reading each and every bounce message to better determine the real cause.

Hope this helps,

David

PS: And if you recently moved you host or IP address or server, then you may have more issues.

[Travis-Mc]

That's a Google Analytics graph so he's not talking about emails bouncing back. He's talking about the percent of people that go to the site that don't visit any other pages and leave to go to another site.


From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_rate
Bounce rate is a term used in web site traffic analysis. It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.
The formula used to calculate bounce rate is: Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing One Page / Total Number of Visits

A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.
________

If the session length for analytics didn't change, and the only thing that changed was the upgrade to VB4, then the OP is thinking people are actually visiting less pages per visit because of VB4.

[Zachery]

There are far too many things that bounce on the web, not being specific here isn't helping.

[oddmud]

A bounce rate can go up, just because the users don't think it's the same site. Or they don't like what they see as far as the upgrade.

[enfoque21]

There are far too many things that bounce on the web, not being specific here isn't helping.

He is clearly talking about visitors bouncing.

[satlazone]

I am talking about visitors bounce rate.
As you can see, also the "time on site" paragraph is reduced since the upgrade
http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/1778/59682881.png

I really don't understand what caused this, I have to find a solution asap.

[Zachery]

I know that now, just saying in the future you may want to be more specific/

[the geek]

And what is the metric for visits? Is it the same/more/less?

[satlazone]

I did compare the days BEFORE upgrade (Feb 10, 2010 - Feb 20, 2010) and AFTER upgrade (Feb 21, 2010 - Mar 3, 2010)
http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/3500/18389611.png

As you can see, Visits and unique visitors increased.
Pageviews reduced.
Time on Site reduced.
Bounce Rate increased. (not good!)

And I am just asking myself, WHY?

[HondaATC]

Mine has went up some too, but not that drastically. I've had about a 6% rise in bounce rate since I switched before Christmas (Was 22%, now around 28%). And my average time on the site has decreased by about a minute, and 10 seconds to right around 10 minutes, flat.

[the geek]

Tough to say. The first image you showed of the big spike in bounce rates was for end of Jan/first week of Feb. This last image is of the last week of Feb.

What I was trying to ascertain was if you were just getting a big influx of one off visitors that felt they were in the wrong space, but you can't see that from the graphs you provided because the graphs are from different time periods. The only contributing factor from a vb4 upgrade that I can tell is if your site was significantly unresponsive or dead during that time. If that was the case, I can't see how analytics would have recorded in the first place

HTHs

[svtsnake01]

Bringing this back from the dead.

I'm curious if the OP ever determined what was causing the issue?

[donald1234]

In my experience, any major changes to site/domain results in a decrease and then recovery, hopefully to better than before. An upgrade from 3X to 4X is a major change and the google bots will be thinking this is different as will your users. Give it some time to recover.