Sudden change in Google Analytics bounce rates after a new website launch

This post may help someone noticing a huge increase in bounce rates on a website especially after a new website launch. This happened to one of the websites that we launched for a client with a highly popular and very old website.

The problem with the huge increase in bounce rates turned out to be that there were two versions of the Google Analytics code installed on the website. After the re-design and re-launch the code was correctly installed only once. This resulted in a huge increase in bounce rates simply because previously, with 2 Google Analytics tracking codes installed, each visit by a user would result in 2 page views and with 2 pages views it becomes impossible to become a “bounce” visit.