Something Strange is Happening Over at Google...

We’ve been noticing something strange happening with google analytics, and it’s confusing, to say the least. Over the past reporting period, we’ve noticed that bounce rates have dramatically decreased from roughly 40% down to 3-4%, and page event traffic has not been triggering showing no page interactions or traffic, but overall traffic on the site shows the same. So the question is; is this a platform issue, or is this something to do with Google?

Things Have been Weird….

Seriously, to say the least. With consumer privacy taking the forefront of Google collecting their data starting July of 2023, things have been shaken up in the marketing world. There’s a large elephant in the room that a lot of people have been ignoring but as we get closer to the deadline, signs that things are going to be changing are starting to surface more and more….and that’s how we came across this, uh, change so to speak. 

What we’re seeing 

As a Marketing Platform for agencies, partners, and dealerships, we’ve seen a lot but this one has us stumped. Roughly a few weeks ago we started encountering strange issues within our GA dashboard that would make most marketers raise a suspicious eyebrow. As we mentioned above, we were noticing that entire chunks of traffic data from specific pages were missing on our reports (literally showing zero engagement), but upon reviewing the overall traffic, the numbers didn't match up. 

Issues that could be causing it

Upon researching the issues that could be causing this, we ran down some of the common problems that could be causing this, but to no avail - here are some of the things we investigated;

• Double tagging
• Poor migration from hardcoded GA to GA via GTM
• Some e-commerce hits fire together with a page view
• Some other events are fired together with a page view
• In the single-page application, the virtual page view is sent right after a regular page view
• Scroll-tracking is tracked as interactions

We’ll break down each one of these issues and what we did to test it - let's get to it

Double tagging

Double tagging occurs when there are two identical Google Analytics tracking tags, each of which delivers a page view. Remember how a bounce rate is defined? Two page views equal two interactions (hits) equals a 0% bounce rate.

The fix

Although there are numerous ways to check this, here are a few of the simplest:

• Using the Chrome Tag Assistant (legacy) extension
• Monitoring GA real-time reports
• Through the use of the dataLayer Inspector Chrome add-on

Bad Migration

This is connected to the previous point. In fact, improper migration is a common cause of double-tagging. Many websites still use the old method of implementing Google Analytics, which is to ask a developer to add the tracking code(s) directly to the website's source. When its owners eventually decide to use Google Tag Manager, they must do a proper migration (which in many cases is not easy at all).

The essential thing to remember is that a successful migration requires removing all hardcoded GA codes from all pages and replacing them with GA Universal Analytics tags in a Google Tag Manager container. However, not everyone achieves this result, and they finally wind up with double tagging and duplicate data: the hardcoded tracking codes track the same interactions as the ones defined in Google Tag Manager (and then sent to that very same Google Analytics property).

Some e-commerce hits fire together with a page view

This is true for Enhanced E-commerce on a website. Because it allows marketers and analysts to monitor the whole funnel (from product viewing to purchase), it stands to reason that some Enhanced E-commerce steps/events are communicated to GA when the page is launched (for example, when a product list is viewed). In such circumstances, Google Analytics receives two hits: a standard page view and an event with E-commerce data (e.g. product impression).

To transmit EE data to Google Analytics, add it to a Universal Analytics event or page view tag in GTM. When a developer pushes E-commerce data to the Data Layer, you must enable Enhanced E-commerce features in each tag with which you want to transport E-commerce data to GA.

Some other events are sent to GA right after the page view

It's still feasible for some other events to happen directly after the initial page view hit even if Enhanced E-commerce isn't deployed on a site. Check the generated Google Analytics reports after using the previously mentioned way of checking the implementation with Tag Assistant Recordings. To begin, open GA reports (in the Google Analytics interface) and navigate to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages to see which pages (most visited) have the lowest bounce rate. That is where I would begin my search. Enable Tag Assistant Recordings and walk through the pages to gather data and see which events fire on each page view. These are your possible suspects.

A virtual page view is provided immediately after a standard page view in a single-page application

When a visitor navigates across a single-page application or website, it does not refresh. As a result, some more preparation is required to begin seeing how visitors engage with your content. If URL fragments (those that follow a #) are not present in the URL, you could request that a developer push certain page-related information to the Data Layer whenever a visitor navigates from one section/page to another. The primary idea behind these solutions is to fire a Google Analytics page view tag whenever a page's state changes (for example, a visitor traveled from example.com/#pricing to example.com/#contact-us). It may appear to be straightforward, but there is one important distinction. Because single-page applications (SPA) are not coded in the same way, it is reasonable for state updates to respond differently.

Scroll tracking is tracked as interactions

This was the catalyst that sparked the bounce rate discussion in the GTM community. Because everyone wants a low bounce rate, one member was unsure why he should configure the Scroll Tracking GA events as non-interaction hits. Consider the following scenario. A visitor arrives at your website, scrolls roughly 50% of the way up the page, and then exits after 5 seconds (without doing anything). Should this be considered a bounce or a session with interactivity (the only interaction here was scrolling)? When a page height is quite low, this produces concerns with an artificially low bounce rate in Google Analytics. In that situation, the scroll trigger will activate immediately after the page view because the visitor has indeed reached the 25% page height mark.

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