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I had an email a couple of days ago from someone asking me how to calculate the bounce rate for a page using my PHP Class for the Google Analytics API.

The formula supplied from Google from the “Common Calculations” section of the Analytics API documentation says the bounce rate for a particular page should be caculated like this:

ga:bounces/ga:uniquePageviews,ga:pagePath
 

To work this out using my PHP Class you would do something like the following example. I’ve multiplied the caculation up by 100 to give a percentage in this example.

$data = $api->data($id, 'ga:pagePath', 'ga:bounces,ga:uniquePageviews');
 foreach($data as $page_path => $row) {
 $bounce_rate = round(100 * $row['ga:bounces'] / $row['ga:uniquePageviews'], 2);
 echo "$page_path $bounce_rate%n";
 }
 

The round(…, 2) rounds the number to 2 decimal places (see my rounding numbers with PHP post for more details).

The above example would output the following from my own data as at the time of writing this post.

/jquery-get-set-form-values/ 87.17%
 /article/apache/restart-apache/ 94.31%
 /article/mysql/delete-all-data-mysql/ 91.23%
 /php-http-referer-variable/ 92.74%
 /check-uncheck-checkbox-jquery/ 86.73%
 /article/mysql/cross-table-update/ 88.99%
 /article/networking/open-firewall-msn-icq/ 94.37%
 /article/linux-unix-bsd/howto-check-md5-file/ 94.75%
 /upper-lower-case-strings-mysql/ 95.69%
 /install-yum-with-rpm-on-centos/ 87.36%
 

The defaults for the ->data() method will get data for the month to yesterday and for the first 10 records only. This can be modified to a different date range and/or number of records. For example, to get the same data for 1000 records for the same date range you could do this:

$data = $api->data($id, 'ga:pagePath', 'ga:bounces,ga:uniquePageviews', '', '', '', 1000);
 

I’ve realised in writing this I don’t actually have a post dedicated to the parameters for the data call so will write one and post it tomorrow.

While trying to debug why something wasn’t working, I needed to see what data had been assigned to a Smarty template but from within the template itself (I didn’t have time to try and work out where in the PHP code the stuff was assigned and debug from there). This post shows how to do a var_dump or print_r from within the Smarty template itself.

The PHP websites I manage email me all notices, warnings and errors and I occasionally get warnings resulting from bots requesting bad URLs. This post looks at a PHP parse_url error caused by an incorrect piece of code that was published which has since been corrected, but there are clearly still scripts out there using the old code and making bad requests.