Remove Bounce Rate and replace it with Engaged Visitors

[metmarkosaric]

Bounce rate has always been a bit of a weird metric in the world of web analytics.

In the past we've spoken about replacing it with something inverse of bounce rate that rolls multiple metrics into a single engagement score. The main limiting factor was that it's not the industry standard so would need a lot of communication and explanation. But now in the GA4 version they're removing Bounce Rate and replacing it with Engaged Session which makes it easier for us to explain a similar move.

For a visitor to qualify as Engaged, the visitor must do at least one of the following or something along similar lines during their visit:

• Visit 2 or more pages
• Fire a conversion event
• Actively engage with the site for at least X seconds
• Any other ideas?

Any thoughts on this?

[Vigasaurus]

I think those make a lot of sense, one thing to consider in my opinion though is that some people (myself included) use a conversion event as a kind of pulse event, that fires on an entry to track various metrics through the event props. For myself it includes various generalized user settings and similar (think font size or theme-selection for a blog example). I may well be in the minority, but I think if a conversion event is able to call a user "engaged", having a way to call specific conversions as "non-engaging" would be useful. Maybe something like plausible('custom', {engaging: false, props: {...}}), with it defaulting to true, of course.

I do also think that it could be very neat, if this method was employed, to have access to a filter of Engaged sessions, but I recognize that wouldn't be very backwards compatible and I personally don't remember the session structure well enough to speak on this idea's complexity - but just an idea.

[Vigasaurus]

Yeah that's a good point about the script size - maybe there's some smart stuff we can do in there to just loop over the valid options (props & meta & now interactivity) and stringify them dynamically instead of doing them all separately, it probably just needs some testing, but I do think some optimization and it could be made to match the existing setup in size (or at least be very close).

As far as it being interaction: false, I did originally think that too, but it feels kinda weird for the default for a property like that being treated as truthy when not defined, no? I'm probably also overthinking it though, it does feel more natural just a bit ... wrong as far as how truthiness works heh

[ukutaht]

Eh, it just defaults to true when not defined. I don't see anything wrong with that 😄

I would really like to remove the meta field. I don't think anyone uses it but I have to verify before removing it.

Thinking about it a bit more I'm definitely leaning towards putting this in props at the moment. It's also consistent with how pageview is a special event name instead of having some sort of separate 'type' attribute on an event or something.

[Vigasaurus]

Actually a note here - to both save script size, and make it extremely extensible, wouldn't it just make most sense for the entire options variable from trigger(eventName, options) to get stringified and passed along? Then we can offload all the parsing etc to elixir, while keeping the script even smaller than it is now (since it has the duplication for props & meta, and that could become just one stringify with this solution)

[ukutaht]

Yeah I had the same though but then I realized we let people send callback as an option as well. That should definitely not be serialized and sent.

[Vigasaurus]

Huh I somehow never noticed that was even an option - yeah I guess that does complicate things a bit though, especially since any extra changes there (e.g. moving the callback out to be the third param) would be a backwards compatibility/documentation nightmare.

[oliverpool]

Actively engage with the site for at least X seconds

Since the X could depend on the page (did the user read my whole blog post before quitting, or were they bored after the introduction?), I think it would be very useful to still know how long a page-visit lasted (see my previous comment regarding a possible implementation #111 (comment))

[metmarkosaric]

Yes, time on individual pages is still the main metric I personally miss in Plausible and we'll for sure add it at some point.

[ukutaht]

Actively engage with the site for at least X seconds

I wonder how this is implemented in GA. There are so many ways to skin this cat that any standardization on this metric is probably impossible.

[luciandavidescu]

"(...) during their visit:"

• Scroll until the end of the main content

[Dan0sz]

Maybe clicking on an outgoing link should count as engaged as well? It does show that the visitor read the content.

[metmarkosaric]

yeah any of the different goals/events could be included (file download, external link click...)

[ukutaht]

I suppose it would count, sort of, as a 'conversion event'?