Very HIGH Bounce Rate since VB4 upgrade

[svtsnake01]

My pageviews are way down, but visitors are higher than ever!

Took me awhile to figure out the date when I made the change to vBulletin 4

Before vBulletin 4, the bounce rate was at 35% and immediately after the upgrade it was at 45% and has increased ever since.

Before vBulletin 4, the pages/visitor was 7.3, immediately after the upgrade it dropped to 5.4 and it continues to suffer.

Before vBulletin 4, total pageviews were averaging around 1.2 million, after the upgrade it was at 900,000 and has been on the decline since then.

And I think what really makes the pageview total look bad is the fact that with all these negative analytic numbers, the unique visitors has increased from 55-60k to 90k (currently)

I'm seriously considering a switch to XF now

[svtsnake01]

Its been 3 years and mine hasn't returned to teh sub 20% that it use to sit at. Its around 40 and some change now.

My pageviews are way down, but visitors are higher than ever!

[svtsnake01]

LOL! I upgraded my site back when 4.0 was released. Its had plenty of time.

[HondaATC]

Its been 3 years and mine hasn't returned to teh sub 20% that it use to sit at. Its around 40 and some change now.

[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.

[svtsnake01]

Bringing this back from the dead.

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

[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

[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.

[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?

[the geek]

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

[Zachery]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Zachery]

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