I’m advising my clients to do what should be done anytime core data inputs change and impact other key metrics: explain the change, why it happened, what has changed, and how to live with the new reality.

Specific to conversion rate, the best you’ll be able to do to create some semblance of sanity for before/after comparison is to wait a couple more weeks until you have more data and calculate the overall delta in visits.  If you’re up 30% on average, then a loose way to adjust historical numbers will be to increase prior visits by 30% and re-calculate conversion rates based on the “adjusted” visit number.  This is NOT going to be a very clean “scientific” way to adjust the data, but you don’t have many other options.  

One thing to keep in mind: CONVERSIONS shouldn’t have changed, so you can always trend conversions and for historical comparisons, trend the %change in total conversions over time.

I agree, this is frustrating.  The change has simply created a new reality for GA data… long-term that is probably going to be good, but it’s hard to accept in the moment.

Best,

-Caleb

Thanks for reading, and posting some feedback.  ”Good” has always been subjective to your site.  I think overall this is going to lower bounce rates across the board from averaging around 50% to maybe 45%.  But, the biggest change will depend on YOUR site and YOUR customer behavior as it relates to browsing patterns.

On the thought of Bounce Rate, I would argue that overall Bounce Rate has been and still is broken unless you are measuring the entirety of user experience.  If I go to your site, scroll around and read all the content on the landing page, click on things that don’t load a new page like outbound links, downloads, or script objects, and then leave, GA before and now will consider be as having “bounced” when in *reality* I was far from bouncing.  Check out http://www.analyticsengine.net for a tool that will help solve this by making GA track more comprehensive interaction and user behavior.

Lastly, you have a unique opportunity to learn about user behavior with this change.  Try comparing the days following the update to the same days of the week prior to the update, then look at, say, keywords or landing pages.  Where you see big changes in bounce rate highlights keywords or landing pages where *user behavior* involves entering and leaving but coming back later through some other traffic source.  This is the only time you’ll really be able to see this.

Hope this helps,

-Caleb