[true_religion]

I'm not seeing multiple inserts per page, and I checked their 'stub' pages as well. They only have GA in the head.

[integraton]

_utm.gif is apparently requested 3 times with the same google analytics account id.

[davidp]

In Chrome's F12 tools I see three _utm.gif requests from the article itself. According to http://utmgifparser.appspot.com/, the three requests appear identical except for the "X10 data" ('utme'); not sure of the significance of that w.r.t. GA reporting. Any GA experts care to enlighten?

[true_religion]

_utm.gif is the generic way that Google Analatics communicates back with its servers---there's no rest API.

So if you're doing things like event tracking, without counting the event as a page view, then you'll still see another request to _utm.gif

They appear to have one normal _trackPageView call in the header, then one or more other calls coming from within minimized JavaScript files.

Here's one:

     _gaq.push(["_trackEvent", e, t, n.toString(), parseInt(r, 10), !0])

This is the signature for _trackEvent

    _trackEvent(category, action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)

!0 evaluates to true in javascript so this event is marked as non-interactive, and thus doesn't count as an extra page view and won't be used in bounce-rate calculations.

Presuming the other calls are identical, then their reported bounce rate should be correct.

[integraton]

Looking at the two additional requests, they do currently have the utmni parameter, marking them as non-interactive.

However, the top comment references Google Analytics events on scroll that don't appear to be there now. One of FastCo.Labs folks also made the following comment:

  This made me curious as well. It turns out there was a
  technical change made at around the same time that is
  going to account for some of it. We're running an
  experiment now and will update with results.

I don't see the update from him. Given all of this, I would guess that they were triggering events incorrectly and have since fixed it (the article is 3 months old).

[irollboozers]

That's extremely embarrassing.