Chrome 37 behavior and Tealium/SiteCatalyst

[sriram_devadas]

Hi, We use SiteCatalyst for reporting and Tealium as the tag management system. We use the SiteCatalyst AppMeasurement tag. Recently Google Chrome 37 was released. We see a general uptick in bounce rate, visits, orders, revenue in Chrome 37 as compared to Chrome 36 in SiteCatalyst. It is as if all metrics (negative or positive) are reported in greater numbers. Could this be due to something about Chrome 37 which causes Tealium to be loaded differently? Any other thoughts on this trend? Thanks, Sriram

[roshan_gonsalko]

Hi Sriram, Thanks for your note. This is interesting. I'm quite experienced with SiteCatalyst so I'd be interested to dig in a bit more into this. Are you able to confirm whether the following metrics have increased/decrease (and the difference between Chrome 36 and 37)? - bounce rate - page views - visits - orders Thanks, Roshan

[sriram_devadas]

Hi Roshan, Thanks for offering to help. I will run some tests to cross-check my assertions (comparing with other browsers to ensure the increase was not due to normal holiday season increases etc.). Will post the data here by EOD today. Sriram

[sriram_devadas]

Hi Roshan, Here is the data. I took 2 time slices - Aug 11 to 29 and Sept 8 to Sept 26. These roughly represent Chrome 36 and Chrome 37 (with some overlap). Leaving out Sept 1st week to reduce impact of Labor day weekend related traffic. Over these 2 time periods, I checked the change in metrics for desktop google browsers (Chrome all versions - mostly 36 and 37) and desktop microsoft browsers (IE all versions - mostly 11, 10, 9, 8). Page views (mean) - Increase of 38.71 % for Chrome - Increase of 16.19% for IE Visits (mean) - Increase of 65.93% % for Chrome - Increase of 14.44% for IE Bounces (mean) - Increase of 353.88% for Chrome - Increase of 16.67% for IE Bounce rate (mean) - Increase of 174.15 % for Chrome (from 10.56 to 28.95) - Increase of 11.02% for IE (from 7.71 to 7.96) Orders (mean) - Increase of 34.36% for Chrome - Increase of 14.52% for IE I can send the actual numbers if that helps. In general there is a bigger increase for all stats in Chrome, but the visits, bounces and bounce rate seem to have increased far more than the page views and orders. I am not sure what this means and if it helps form any hypothesis related to Chrome 37 and/or Tealium js. Any help is appreciated. Let me know if I should mail the actual numbers. Thanks, Sriram

[sriram_devadas]

Another piece of info I learned was that most of the bounces are from organic search channel i.e. via Google searches. Sriram

[kevin_fowler]

Hi Roshan, Have you had a chance to take a look at this? Kevin

[roshan_gonsalko]

Hi Sriram, Apologies for the delay and thanks for this data. Looking at this, it looks as if Chrome 37 is loading Tealium much faster than 36: - If a user moves page without Tealium loading and the SiteCat tag firing its request then the page view will not be counted. - If Chrome 37 loads Tealium faster then we'll be getting more page views - An increased bounce rate and an increase in visits suggests to me that more of your first-time users are being tracked (the first page view will probably be a bit slower as none of the Tealium scripts will have been cached yet) - If Tealium can be loaded quicker then you'll be able to capture more of these first-time users than before It would be interesting to see if this is related to the update for Windows specifically: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8431/google-updates-chrome-to-version-37-with-directwrite-support It suggests that the increase should be much bigger on Chrome 37 windows vs Mac due to the 'Direct Write' support. If your utag.js call is low down the page then you would noticed this increase even more than usual (utag.js should really be at the very top of the header). I'd suggest you get in touch with your Account Manager and discuss with someone in your local Tealium Solutions/Services team to investigate further but to me this points to a much better performance from Chrome on Windows but it would really need someone in your region to investigate to confirm. Hope this helps! Roshan