If you have multiple subdomains on your site, like store.name.com and www.name.com, you might want to use the code that allows you to see them all in one Analytics profile.
But there’s a downside. Your stats for store.name.com/index.html and www.name.com/index.html will get combined.
There is also a solution. You can create an advanced filter to keep them separate. See How do I track all of the subdomains for my site in one profile?
Update: Unfortunately, this messes up the site overlay feature. When it tries to create a site overlay it puts your subdomain in the wrong place in the URL.
Greg Krehbiel Analytics
The last few days I’ve done some reading on bounce rates and spent some time in Google Analytics getting a feel for what’s what, and it seems that the best rule for bounce rates is that you’re doing well if your bounce rate is lower than it was last month.
Some articles will give you some fixed guidelines. For example, How to Fix a Leaky Web Site says under 25% is good, but over 40% is too high.
I don’t buy that because your bounce rate will depend on a whole lot of things that will vary from site to site. A blog has a completely different site architecture than a store that sells dishwasher parts, and different sites get different sorts of traffic.
Here are a few things to look at to get a sense of what’s going on with your site.
Look at your traffic sources and compare the bounce rates for each. (E.g., direct traffic, referring sites, and paid search vs. natural search.) Look at your top landing and top exit pages.
Do you see any patterns? Look at the pages with a low bounce rate and see how they differ from the pages with a high bounce rate. Do they attract different sorts of visitors? Is there a clear call to action, or some obvious next step on one page and not on the other?
Remember that a high bounce rate may simply be a sign of poorly qualified traffic. Your site may rank highly for a word that has several different meanings. (E.g., “cobra” can be a snake or a kind of mustang.)
I’ve set up some “advanced segments” in Google Analytics that let me track how many people stay for one page view, or two, or three or more. I then run a report on my top search terms and see what percentage of my traffic falls into those three groups. Good pages not only have a low bounce rate, but they have a high “time on site” and a high percentage of people in the “3 or more” category.
Greg Krehbiel Analytics