Oh well. I think 80% is great by the way. Even using excerpts on my home page it still takes some coaxing to invite people in to click around and enjoy.

I just checked your code and it’s in the Ultimate Google Analytics plug-in as well.

I was pretty stoked about my drop as well but then I thought “There’s no way people find me THAT interesting…”

I had mine in Thesis and Headspace. I deleted one and my rate returned to 80% or so.

Now I have to actually work to get people to stick around. Lame.

You are exactly right man. Thanks for the note!

Brad

You have the analytics code in your site twice. This causes every single user to count as two which drops the rate to zero.

Delete the code you added in the Thesis control panel and you will see the bounce return to its original rate.

I know because it happened to me.

Sorry to rain on your parade.

Yes, my bounce rata always goes through the roof on posts like that… or if you hit the front page of digg, reddit, etc. The traffic spike is still good though!

I’ll add the subscribe to comment plugin… thanks for the suggestion.

Best, Brad

It’s quite an impressive graph, well, both of them. In my case, it has actually gotten a bit worse since I switched to Thesis. But it could also be the fact that my daily pageviews saw a 3-500% increase compared to usual, because I wrote two posts that received a ton of search engine traffic related to that particular problem, so the user came, they saw, they fixed their problem, they left. They got what they came for – so actually, it’s my own fault – I should have linked to the solution on another page I guess

(PS: Where’s your “subscribe to comments”-plugin, so I will get an e-mail if/when you reply to this post? Now I haven’t got a clue if it will happen and I might very well forget to come back and check )

I’ll check them out and then post the results here.

Thanks Brian,

Brad

2. I wonder what http://www.clicktale.com/ or http://userfly.com/ show your users doing… where on the page(s) are they following links that cause such a low bounce rate?

3. Congratulations!

You make some great points, and I was well aware of the irony of using Google Analytics to make a claim while linking to an article dissing its usefulness. I’m impressed you noticed that too!

OK, so to answer your questions…

@Looks like the trend was already emerging on its own:

This was because the switch to Thesis wasn’t made at midnight. In fact, to make things even worse, I had be switching back and forth between the old theme and Thesis for a couple of days. The arrow in the images shows *about* where Thesis was the main theme being shown to visitors. Basically if you were to look at my stats for the last 3 months you would see a flat line and then the drop when Thesis started being shown for both pageviews and for bounce rate. I agree that was a bit confusing.

@Not making fun of Analytics:

Once again, you are right on. Google Analytics is great for some things but too damn complex for most people. Usefulness knocking is a great way to describe it.

-Brad