Great news! Google have fixed the use of the _setVar method that sets the custom variable in Google Analytics – useful for recording other dimensions that you might want to segment by e.g. Premium customer VS Standard customer.
Previously, using this variable completely broke the bounce rate reporting as it counted the usage of _setVar as an ‘interaction’. A bounce happens when the visitor only has 1 interaction with the site, so even if they only visited 1 page but the _setVar was used, it wouldn’t be counted as a bounce because pageview+setVar = 2 interactions. The following image shows what happened to us the last time we tried to use the _setVar method…
_setVar destroyed our bounce rate metric!
