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How exactly do they track if people actually read the entire article? Merely based on time?
Google Analytics can track pages and average time spent on page. It can even track visitors flow. Everyone should get an analytics account and see the insane amount of things that Google can track for YOU, for FREE with just three lines of extra code on your page.
The site appears to have Google Analytics placed multiple times into its source code. This messes up tracking and artificially dramatically drops bounce rates. In my experience working with content sites, the real bounce rate reduction you see in moving from shorter articles to longer ones is closer to 5% or so - from, say, 77% to 72%. Still dramatic, but not nearly as dramatic as the drop you'll get by double-insert…
How exactly do they track if people actually read the entire article? Merely based on time?
If you want to add this to your own site, checkout jQuery ScrollDepth: https://github.com/robflaherty/jquery-scrolldepth
The site appears to have Google Analytics placed multiple times into its source code. This messes up tracking and artificially dramatically drops bounce rates. In my experience working with content sites, the real bounce rate reduction you see in moving from shorter articles to longer ones is closer to 5% or so - from, say, 77% to 72%. Still dramatic, but not nearly as dramatic as the drop you'll get by double-insert…
From the article:
Stub stories work like this: You write the first installment like any other story. But when more news breaks, you go back to the article, insert an update at the top, and change the headline and subheadline to reflect the update. Our system updates the story "slug" when the headline changes--check the URL of this story, and you'll see words from the headline in the URL: /this-is-what-happens-when-publishers-invest-in-long-stories. But the number preceding the slug--on this article, it's 3009577--is a unique node ID which never changes. So essentially, every time we update an article, we get a fresh URL with a fresh headline, but pointing back to the same (newly updated) article.
We can check this by checking older stubs.
Edit: on checking the page source, I only see GA in there 2x - once to call a GA API from google-analytics.com, and once more to (I think) load ga.js from google-analytics.com. How many times do you see that page calling GA?
I can, of course, use my imagination. But I am more interested in reading why a lower bounce rate is the future for media revenue. The quote near the end from Vox CEO is the best part of the article, but even it doesn't make the bounce = revenue connection explicit.
I will also add that, if those analytics are correct, that is a crazy-low bounce rate. A 50-60% bounce rate seems super strong to me. Dipping well below 50% seems unlikely for any site with significant traffic coming from disparate sources.
How exactly do they track if people actually read the entire article? Merely based on time?
Google Analytics can track pages and average time spent on page. It can even track visitors flow. Everyone should get an analytics account and see the insane amount of things that Google can track for YOU, for FREE with just three lines of extra code on your page.
The site appears to have Google Analytics placed multiple times into its source code. This messes up tracking and artificially dramatically drops bounce rates. In my experience working with content sites, the real bounce rate reduction you see in moving from shorter articles to longer ones is closer to 5% or so - from, say, 77% to 72%. Still dramatic, but not nearly as dramatic as the drop you'll get by double-insert…
Translation: old wine in new bottles.
Pages/Visit is stable yet Bounce Rate suddenly dropped significantly.