My avg engagement time dropped by 50%

exploredbymarta

My average engagement time on Google Analytics has always been consistent - about 1min30 to 1min40 as long as I remember. However, on August 1st it suddenly dropped by 50% and has stayed there ever since. I feel like this is a mistake caused by something (on the side of Google Analytics) because Ezoic's analytics show a very linear average visit duration as well as average engaged time/visit. All other statistics don't show any anomaly at all - everything is normal and I have a steady growth in visits both from social media and Google Search. Nothing has gone suddenly viral on Pinterest. Would somebody take a look and help me pinpoint the problem here or any ideas about what may have caused this anomaly? I'm afraid this will eventually hurt my ratings on Google Search.

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On another note, there was a cache-off period on Ezoic at the end of July and it was said that it was fixed. My cache is still off for July 26.

Monica

exploredbymarta Please can you share Google Analytics access with info116@ezoic.com ? Then let me know here when you've done that and we can take a closer look 🙂

exploredbymarta

I have shared access to info116@ezoic.com

Monica

exploredbymarta Thanks, I'm seeing a couple of dips in things like engaged pageviews per visit and increased bounce rate but nothing on the same scale as we're seeing in GA. I'm also seeing an increase in big data analytics reports on pageviews / visit. So this doesn't seem to correspond.

What I did notice was when I compared 1st Aug - 20th Aug with 11th July - 30th July in GA you've got an increase in engaged sessions (up 58.39%) as well as the decrease in average engagement time (60.95%). I'm wondering if there's been a change on your site that's impacted how GA is measuring visits, and some visits are getting split in two?
Please can you check for any changes in your GA code implementation? For example that it's not added twice?

Please can you also check if any other changes made around this time have impacted GA's tracking? And let us know what these changes were.

Thanks!