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Bounce count / rate might not be accurate: add Non-interaction events feature #9199

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tsteur opened this issue Nov 11, 2015 · 23 comments
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c: Data Integrity & Accuracy c: Tracking For issues related to getting tracking data into Matomo. Enhancement For new feature suggestions that enhance Matomo's capabilities or add a new report, new API etc. Major Indicates the severity or impact or benefit of an issue is much higher than normal but not critical.

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@tsteur
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tsteur commented Nov 11, 2015

Just seeing bounce count is calculated by sum(case " . self::LOG_VISIT_TABLE . ".visit_total_actions when 1 then 1 when 0 then 1 else 0 end

but it looks like visit_total_actions is also increased for events, searches etc.

This means when there is a pageview followed by an event, it is not counted as bounced but it should be I think

@tsteur tsteur added the Bug For errors / faults / flaws / inconsistencies etc. label Nov 11, 2015
@hpvd
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hpvd commented Nov 12, 2015

hmm why counting as bounced? If there's an event, the visitor does not disappear suddenly, do he?
Maybe you can give an example for the kind of event you have in mind?

@tsteur
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tsteur commented Nov 12, 2015

Say you use JavaScript Error Tracking feature in Piwik which triggers an event when there is a JS error. It would never count any bounce. Or maybe there's a video player on a page that starts automatically and tracks an event etc.

Some users might not want to have a bounce counted after a certain event as there was some kind of interaction but at list Piwik describes it as follows:

The percentage of visits that only had a single pageview. This means, that the visitor left the website directly from the entrance page.

With the current implementation this is not the case. For SEO only considering pageviews might be better?

@hpvd
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hpvd commented Nov 12, 2015

hmm, thanks for examples and pointing to piwiks definition of a bounce.
We make the observation, that more and more visitors visit only one page.
Maybe that's not always bad. E.g. if they find exactly what they were looking for that's pretty fine.
They could stay for 5minutes on the site: reading, open a image lightbox, watch a video etc.
That's not bad. They could also have seen the advertisements on the site directly, in image gallery or at the beginning of the video... They could perfectly keep in mind the brand of the website.
And next time they see a result in google of the site they will come back because they trust the brand and become returning visitors everytime they search on the same topic area.
So these visitors are bounced?
What should they do more if google brings them directly exactly to the place they were looking for?
The better google's algorithms work, the less pages needs to be visited (at least at non ecommerce sites)
Maybe a bounce is only if people leave within 5-10 seconds and trigger no event...

@tsteur
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tsteur commented Nov 12, 2015

A bounce doesn't have to be something bad. It can be good or bad. It always depends on the site and probably even on the page whether a bounce is good or bad. I'm not saying something is good or bad. Only saying that the current bounce calculation doesn't match the documentation in the UI and what users might expect.

@hpvd
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hpvd commented Nov 12, 2015

sure, i get this :-)
Were only examples...

@hpvd
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hpvd commented Nov 12, 2015

For many many people bounces are bad. Otherwise they would not count them...

@mattab
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mattab commented Nov 18, 2015

For this we need a new feature, the ability to define a given Event tracking request as "Non-Interactive". By default, events are "interactive" and assume that user did an action (clicked mouse, or typed on keyboard). When an event is marked as "non Interactive" then the event would not affect the bounce rate, nor would it affect "Time on website" or "Time on page".

For reference see Google Analytics documentation about non interaction events: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068#NonInteractionEvents

And also: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/events#non-interaction_events

@mattab mattab changed the title Bounce count / rate might not be accurate Bounce count / rate might not be accurate: create Non-interaction events feature Nov 18, 2015
@mattab mattab added Enhancement For new feature suggestions that enhance Matomo's capabilities or add a new report, new API etc. and removed Bug For errors / faults / flaws / inconsistencies etc. labels Nov 18, 2015
@mattab mattab added this to the Mid term milestone Nov 18, 2015
@mattab
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mattab commented Nov 18, 2015

Renamed issue. This also refs: Time spent on page calculation is buggy #9198

See description of issue with Time on page here: #9198 (comment)

@mattab mattab changed the title Bounce count / rate might not be accurate: create Non-interaction events feature Bounce count / rate and Time on page / website might not be accurate: we need Non-interaction events feature Nov 18, 2015
@mattab mattab changed the title Bounce count / rate and Time on page / website might not be accurate: we need Non-interaction events feature Bounce count / rate and Time on page / website might not be accurate: add Non-interaction events feature Nov 18, 2015
@SR-mkuhn
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How is a change/misscalculation mentioned in #9198 not a bug? This might be an enhancement but as it was renamed to include #9198, it is also a bug - and set those numbers in unreliable light.
Were the numbers wrong in 2.15.0 or were they already in 2.14.3?

@tsteur
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tsteur commented Nov 22, 2015

They were already wrong/inaccurate for quite a while. Maybe it would be worth keeping the bug issue #9198 and the original issue of this since we can maybe fix them easier without big changes whereas this issue is hard to implement and probably not going to happen in next 12-24 months.

#9198 and this issue might be possible to fix with just a few lines

@mattab
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mattab commented Nov 23, 2015

@tsteur re-opened #9198 as I didn't realise it was much easier than #9199

@mattab mattab changed the title Bounce count / rate and Time on page / website might not be accurate: add Non-interaction events feature Bounce count / rate might not be accurate: add Non-interaction events feature Nov 23, 2015
@JeSuisUnCaillou
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I also have a problem with the bounce rate :
The bounce count of a page is only counted for the entries. So it has to be divided by the number of entries in order to get the bounce rate.
In the Piwik API, VisitSummary is not calculating the bounce rate like this, it is dividing the bounce count by the number of visits, which results in a bounce rate way much lower.

Is it possible to fix it somehow, in order to get the right bounce count with VisitSummary ? The summary it gives us is very useful, but the bounce rate is unfortunately not corresponding to the bounce rate calculated by other API modules.

@hpvd
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hpvd commented Jan 26, 2016

for everyone interested in bounce rate,
a new characteristic ratio as a "new kind of advanced bounce rate"
is proposed in #9633

@tobiasblessing
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After implementing Matomo Analytics at our website I was wondering whether you could lable tags/events as non interaction.
So I totally vote for this enhancement.

@tsteur tsteur added the Major Indicates the severity or impact or benefit of an issue is much higher than normal but not critical. label Oct 20, 2020
@MatomoForumNotifications

This issue has been mentioned on Matomo forums. There might be relevant details there:

https://forum.matomo.org/t/does-a-clicked-outlink-count-as-a-bounce/41795/3

@dave-anh-kpi
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Hello,
When do you think this new feature "non-interaction event" will be available in Matomo?
We were used to trigger some display events with Google Analytics (product viewed, banners, chatbot...). With Matomo, we cannot be completely free in our tracking methods since it is killing our Bounce Rate...
A lot of my clients are asking why the bounce rate is so low after migrating their tracking from GUA to Matomo.

@heurteph-ei
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For "display events" you may use content impression. Bur not sure if this is counted or not in the bounce rate calculation...

@9joshua
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9joshua commented May 21, 2023

I have another request for this. A customer wishes to create an event for 404 errors while still counting the visit as a bounce.

@9joshua
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9joshua commented Sep 5, 2023

Another customer request for a non-interactive event.

Curently, calling an event like this passes the 5th value as a data parameter:

_paq.push(['trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Name', '22', {
    nonInteraction: 1
}]);

image

Perhaps we could use this to assign an attribute to events which should be ignored for bounce calculations?

@9joshua
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9joshua commented Sep 29, 2023

Another customer has requested this. It was available to them in GA and they need continuity of their tracking strategy as they move to Matomo.

@9joshua
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9joshua commented Oct 19, 2023

I received another request for non-interaction events from a customer who needs to track content interactions while still counting the visit as a bounce if no other actions are taken.

@atom-box
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atom-box commented Oct 23, 2023

Opposite concept (folks asking for ways to take visits away from Bounce):
#17549 Report "Engagement rate" instead of "Bounce rate"
#9633 new characteristic ratio: rate of interested visitors (advanced bounce rate)

@atom-box
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Another upvote for this. A user is feeling data inconsistency:

We are consistently measuring lower bounce rates in Matomo when compared to other tools like GA and Shopify analytics for multiple clients. GA and Shopify tend to be in close agreement on the bounce rate, while our Matomo observed value is 30-50% lower than the consensus of the other two. Is this a common difference... For additional context, our other Matomo metrics compare well with the GA metrics we have access to, namely revenue, order count, and sessions.

@mattab mattab added c: Tracking For issues related to getting tracking data into Matomo. c: Data Integrity & Accuracy labels Dec 10, 2023
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Labels
c: Data Integrity & Accuracy c: Tracking For issues related to getting tracking data into Matomo. Enhancement For new feature suggestions that enhance Matomo's capabilities or add a new report, new API etc. Major Indicates the severity or impact or benefit of an issue is much higher than normal but not critical.
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