The recently-released version of Apple’s browser could have implications for your website reporting.
I recently noticed a significant increase in the bounce rate on one of our client websites. As any web marketer will tell you, bounce rate is one of the key metrics of website performance – for one it is a good indicator of the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. It’s a measure of single page visits to your website – people who arrive at your site, decide it’s not for them and then leave.
Measuring bounce rate by browser type in Google Analytics.
Intrigued, I dug into the site reports to see what could be amiss. I thought there may have been a technical problem affecting a particular browser that was causing users to exit the site. With Google Analytics (indeed with any decent analytics tool) you can isolate and analyse visits by users’ browser types (in GA you’ll find this under ‘Visitors -> Browser Capabilities -> Browsers’).
Firefox and Internet Explorer showed nothing out of the ordinary, but Safari showed a bounce rate of 46% for the past few weeks (against a site average of 16%). In other words, nearly half of all visitors using Safari were leaving after having viewed a single page.
Bounce rates for Safari visits have increased in recent weeks
Using GA to drill down further I could see that one version of Safari in particular seemed to be the cause of the problem: 528.16 which, after a little research, appeared to be the recently released v4 beta.
Top sites view
The new version of Safari features the new ‘top sites’ view. This displays up to 24 thumbnail versions of the sites you visit the most. Google Chrome already has this feature, but in Safari the thumbnails are constantly updated with the current version of the page in question (there are equivalent plugins for Opera and Firefox, but these borwsers do not offer this as standard).
The 'top sites' view in Safari
This is a nice feature that allows you to preview any updates to your favourite sites at a glance. It’s also the source of our bounce rate problem.
You see, each time a thumbnail updates in Safari’s top sites view, the page is requested in exactly the same way as if someone had browsed to the page. Given that users are not always going to click your site from this view, this is resulting in analytics tools reporting loads of single page views. This boosts your bounce rate, and lowers other
metrics such as average time on site and conversion rates.
There may be trouble ahead
The number of visits our client is getting from the new version of Safari is rising rapidly – in fact last week it was used in almost twice as many visits as the next most popular version (thanks to these ‘ghost’ visits).
What’s more, browser developers are constantly adopting each others ideas and it may not be too long before we see similar functionality in IE and Firefox. What is now an emerging problem could become a headache in the months and years to come.
What could this mean?
Unless a solution is developed between analytics and browser vendors (maybe Google are best placed to address this, having a foot in both camps), there will be some significant implications. Visits will go up, as will bounce rates and conversion rates will go down.
If browsers implement this functionality in different ways, then comparing like with like is going to be a problem. Let’s imagine that in Firefox it is the default startup screen, but that in IE it exists behind an optional tab. In this scenario Firefox visits are going to be more profoundly affected by the change that are IE users.
If these are metrics you currently report or rely on then this is something you should be aware of.
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Tags: Analytics, browsers, google analytics, safari
[...] Safari 4 – how its Top Sites view can mess up your stats 16.04.2009 | Posted in Computer World The recently-released version of Apple’s browser could have implications for your website reporting. I recently noticed a significant increase in the bounce rate on one of our client websites. As any web marketer will tell you, bounce rate is one of the key metrics of website performance. It’s a measure of single page visits to your website – people who arrive at your site, decide it’s not for them and then leave. Measuring bounce rate by browser type in Google Analytics. Intrigued See the article here: Safari 4 – how its Top Sites view can mess up your stats [...]
Thanks for the article. It helped explain the odd bounce rates for Safari browsers I noticed being reported in Google Analytics for four sites I monitor. If you create an advanced segment that matches for: “Browser = Safari” AND “Java Support = No” AND (”Operating System = Macintosh” OR “Operating System = Windows”) it catches most of these “Top Sites” page loads. Its not 100% accurate because it catches a small quantity of other legitimate traffic–but at least it gives you away to look at your reports without the distortion! I think browsers that have a feature like this should identify those page loads with a unique user agent that can be used for filtering purposes.