Timings

Here’s an interesting and hacky use case for you. It’s all about uncovering bounce metrics for visits which originate from organic Google search results. In particular, the metric we’re interested in is how long user dwelled on the landing page after arriving from organic Google search AND returned to the search engine results page (SERP) using the browser’s back button.

The inspiration for this post came from an audience question at the Best Internet Conference in Lithuania, which I recently attended as a speaker. They were concerned that Google is using Bounce Rate as a search ranking signal, and I was fairly strongly opinionated that it’s simply not possible, as all the “native” GA metrics are really easy to manipulate. However, Dr. Pete from Moz wrote about dwell time in 2012, and it makes a lot of sense. Google should be very interested how long the visitor stays out of the SERP when following a link. If users tend to immediately return to the SERP, it’s very likely the result was not relevant for them.