Analytics Bounce, Exit Rate on Ajax results

Hope someone can advise me on how Google Analytics performs it query's in relation to bounce,exit rates.

We have a site which we recently performed a major upgrade. We have noticed a huge bounce and exit rate from our homepage. It use to have a bounce rate of 2.3% which now has increased to 35%.

One th开发者_StackOverflow中文版ing which springs to mind is on the old site people would put in the search data hit submit and be re-directed to a search results page. Now we perform this action via ajax. We added in the google trackPageview to keep are statistics the same ie.

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'XX-99999-9']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/searchresults/']);

So lets say someone performs a ajax request then exits the site. Would this be an exit from the home page or searchresults or BOTH ?

Hope you can advise.

It's likely that you're looking at this backwards. It's very *unlikely* that 2.3% was a 'real' bounce rate, and more likely that 35% (an excellent bounce rate) is a more realistic number.

A 2.3% bounce rate usually means that either the primary entrance page or all entrance pages were sending multiple hits to Google Analytics at the same time.

But, the basic definition of a bounce is a visit in which only one request (like a single pageview) was sent to Google Analytics.

EDIT:

The exit point is defined as the last pageview you sent to GA. In this case, /searchresults/is the second pageview, after your home page. The exit is recorded as /searchresults/, and the visit is recorded as a non-bounce.

Google doesn't know that your site is using AJAX. All it knows is the information it gets sent. In this instance, even if the browser is still technically on your home page, but your last pageview is a 'virtual' pageview for the searchresults, that will be recorded as the exit point.