Comments on: How GA calculates metrics for accounts

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:08:01 +0000

To GA, “bounce” just means “visit with a single pageview”. So if you have profiles that filter out certain pageviews, yes, that will affect the bounce rate.

By: Leigh Ann

Leigh Ann — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:32:38 +0000

I have a question about how bounce rate and exits are calculated for profiles. As Amy G. described above, we have many separate profiles set up within our account — each tracking a certain section of our site. We are finding that the bounce rates calculated within the profile versus those we find when we drill down in the whole-site profile are different. We get higher bounce rates in the individual profile. For example, if we go into a profile that contains a single state (which lives in a specific folder that we filtered on), it might have a bounce rate of 80%. But if we drill down to that state from the whole-site profile, we get a bounce rate of only 70%.

Is that because GA considers anyone going to a different section/folder on our site to be a bounce or exit from the section/folder that is defined in the profile?

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:58:39 +0000

Amy — By default, you get 50 profiles.

By: Amy G

Amy G — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:25:01 +0000

How many profiles can we have under 1 account in Google Analytics? I read 2 separate answers – 50 & 100. Big difference. I’m looking to create separate profiles, one for each state & country section of my site… nature.org/california, nature.org/mexico, etc. Note we have over 100+ sections right now and employees can access the data easily in Urchin – but I’m looking to transfer to Google Analytics. We’ve already set up about 10 profiles covering our global domain and our major sub-domains.

This will allow users to go directly into their individual sections and see top level data. Is the best way to set up profiles in Google Analytics? using the include rule for each section? I’d be curious to see how you would create that expression. Also, if we’re maxed out on # of profiles can we add 2 sections together under 1 profile rule (nature.org/california + nature.org/arizona). How would we set that up?

Also, I will need to create separate user log ons to access the data. I’d be curious if you knew if there was a cap.

By: David

David — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:31:12 +0000

Nice post, i agree that the new method to display multiple GA accounts is quite useful, and over the christmas/new year break it was interesting to see that most had similar drops in traffic, but the increases after the new year are not as consistent with some growing but multiples and others just returning to previous levels.

The only issue is that on a top down view, you cant change the date comparison set, just daily/weekly/monthly/yearly.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:12:32 +0000

Marco –

It’s the visit-weighted average of the three sites. That is, it’s not simply (time on site 1 + time on site 2 + time on site 3)/3, but more like a recalculation of the average time across all of the sites (still using those “winning” profiles with the highest visits). So it’s (total time in visits across all 3 sites)/(total number of visits across all three sites).

Bounce rate is similarly recalculated across the sites — (total single-page visits across all 3 sites)/(total visits across all three sites).

By: Marco Cilia

Marco Cilia — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 13:40:03 +0000

visits…ok. but what about time on site and bounce rate? I have a profile with 3 sites inside (not copy-profile, three different domains), and time on site displayed in first screen isn’t sum neither average of three