Sudden drop in bounce rate and virtual after installing vbSEO 3.3.0

We installed vbSEO 3.3.0 on 22nd april and here are few observations -

1> Our bounce rate has dropped to 10-12% from 35-40%.

2> While dissecting the traffic, half of the traffic is seen at links like this -

/virtual/on/f-1

/virtual/on/f8/usercp.php

which IMO is same as the forum pages but because of this, the google analytics comparison is throwing me off.

Can anyone help to what must be happening and how to get rid of this "/virtual/on"

Regards,
Rohit

Hello,

those hits are not counted towards total stats in Analytics and the purpose is to allow tracking "folder-like" statistics with any type of URL formats defined in vBSEO CP. This feature is disabled by default in vbseo configuration though.

You do not have a license assigned to your account, please PM me your forums URL/order ID so that I can correct that.

Originally Posted by Oleg Ignatiuk

Hello,

those hits are not counted towards total stats in Analytics and the purpose is to allow tracking "folder-like" statistics with any type of URL formats defined in vBSEO CP. This feature is disabled by default in vbseo configuration though.

You do not have a license assigned to your account, please PM me your forums URL/order ID so that I can correct that.

Hi Oleg,

1> Can you please guide me exactly to access this feature in Admin CP?
2> I double checked and the total stats are being counted in GA.
3> Any clue to such a sharp drop in bounce rate? For forums , I am actually getting a bounce rate of 5% and combining the bounce rate of all the other parts of the site, it is around 12%. I am pretty sure something is wrong here.

Rohit

You do not have a license assigned to your account, please PM me your forums URL/order ID so that I can correct that.

We still do not have any license assigned to you, please use your main forums account that is used for your vBSEO license.

Ok. Posting from the licensed account. Now please help

Cheers,
R.

Thanks
This feature is not available in vBSEO CP, you should check config_vbseo.php for that:

PHP Code:

    define('VBSEO_ADD_ANALYTICS_VIRTUAL',  0); 


(it is disabled by default, but if you have it set to "1", please change to "0")

As far as I know, a drop in bounce rate means something good ( people stay more on your site ).

Once the virtual folders were turned off - the bounce rate went back up. So we guess this is more of a bug than a feature. We got incorrect measurement from GA due to this specific vbseo setting

No , Virtual folder doesn't change anything comparing to tracking. It just adds virtual folder names to your forums to track your settings.

The start of this thread was to understand the drop, it coincided only with enabling the folders. Then when we turned off the virtual folders, the bounce rate again went up back to pre folder levels.

Tons of things can effect the drop and increase. We tested this several times and didn't had any effect on our installations. You should check other things on your site that can trigger the increase or decrease. As i already mentioned this feature has no effect that can effect yoru bounce rate.

We installed vBSEO 3.3.2 about 10 days ago and se huge changes!

With the same traffic as usual we're noting -40% pageviews and +6700% bounce rate. The change came when we upgraded vBSEO from 3.3.0 Gold to 3.3.2.