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We've just gone through and added a series of events to our GA tracking and one of the expected results is we should see our bounce rate, currently at ~60%, drop significantly. However, we are concerned that making a change like this and having the bounce rate drop by an expected 30% or more overnight will trigger some sort of negative effect from Google.

We cannot find documentation on this, does anyone have direct experience?

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  • Not sure what your concern is or where you heard about any negative effects from Google. Do you think they'll penalise you or something for having too many events?? That won't happen as far as I know. The only time Google might step in is if you are collecting PII.
    – nyuen
    Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 17:59
  • My concern is if I "artificially" use events to drop my overall bounce rate from 66% to near zero, will Google interpret that as a black-hat technique and penalize me.
    – JCL1178
    Commented Nov 25, 2016 at 5:29
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    Nope. What you do with your data, how you manipulate it, is up to you (so long as you are not collected and sending PII data to Google). But really, in the end all you are doing is impacting those who need to read and interpret your reports. Google doesn't dock you for that. Many (poorly designed) sites may naturally have a near 0% bounce rate.
    – nyuen
    Commented Nov 25, 2016 at 5:50
  • Thanks. We have a site that provides consumer information and they changed from articles to videos. So instead of getting clicks to a second page, we now have visitors come in, watch a video, and leave. This inflated the bounce rate on the site, so we now report play/pause on the videos as events, which dropped it way, way down. Can you repost the comment as an answer so I can accept?
    – JCL1178
    Commented Nov 25, 2016 at 5:56

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There is no penalty in how you send events on your site. What you do with your data, how you manipulate it, is up to you (so long as you are not passing along PII data to Google). But really, in the end all you are doing is impacting those who need to read and interpret your reports. Google doesn't dock you for that. Many (poorly designed) sites may naturally have a near 0% bounce rate.

From what you describe with the video tracking, you are doing what makes most sense in terms of tracking user engagement with your site - video interactions and progress. I don't see that as a way of 'manipulating' your metrics.

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