Dramatic bounce rate change tied to GTM

[Rich Owings]

I came across an oddity that I thought some of you might be interested in. I recently did an audit for a law firm and one of the things I flagged was an abnormally low bounce rate (<1%). I figured something on the site was registering as an event on every page load and left it to their developers to identify and fix. One of them followed up with me and said it had shot up to 85% and wanted to know if I had done anything to cause that. I had not but I looked into it and could no longer see the GA code on the site, but I did see Google Tag Manager and asked if they had started using GTM to add the GA code. And they had, on the exact date when it shot up. Here's a screenshot...

I don't really have any questions. I just thought it was interesting and wanted to share it, in case it helps anyone figure out bounce rate issues in the future.

 

[Yan Gilbert]

Bounce rate is not usually on my radar so thanks for sharing that.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Weird. Did they misapply the GA code in Tag Manager? Or is 85% their bounce rate?

 

[Rich Owings]

Unknown. I don't have access to their GTM account. But I checked and it is still holding steady at 85%. They have a lot of blog content that they rank well for nationally, that would lead to single page sessions, but I can't imagine it pushing their bounce rate that high.

 

[Tiggerito]

We always check bounce rates in an audit as a quick way to see if there are any tagging issues. Double tagging is very common.