Google Analytics: How to Avoid High Bounce Rates
If you own a website and use Google Analytics to keep track of visitors, you will quickly notice that the infamous bounce rate can shoot up pretty high. Bounce rates of over 60 percent are not a rare sight. High bounce rates are not always a bad thing. That's why we'll take a close look at what the bounce rate actually is, how it is formed, and how you can achieve a realistic bounce rate.
Google and the Bounce Rate - Explained Comprehensibly. Source
The bounce rate of news websites is almost always worse than that of others. Many visitors only come to read a single article and then leave. Bloggers, however, shouldn't know that problem, as in theory, blogs have a much better bounce rate than news magazines as they are more engagement-driven. But there are more, real factors that can create a seemingly poor bounce rate.
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Exact Definition: This is the Bounce Rate
The bounce rate displays the percentage of visitors that leave your website after just one pageview without accessing any further pages of the site Google defines the bounce rate as follows:The bounce rate is the percentage of visits on a single page (that means sessions, in which the user left your website on the landing page without interaction with the site).Thus, if you have a bounce rate of 80 percent, that means that 80 percent of your visitors only looked at one single page, and left your website right after that without clicking anywhere else. However, a high bounce rate doesn't have to be bad. Some types of websites will always have worse bounce rates than others due to their concept.
What Leads to a High Bounce Rates
Google and the Bounce Rate - Explained Comprehensibly. Source
The bounce rate of news websites is almost always worse than that of others. Many visitors only come to read a single article and then leave. Bloggers, however, shouldn't know that problem, as in theory, blogs have a much better bounce rate than news magazines as they are more engagement-driven. But there are more, real factors that can create a seemingly poor bounce rate.
- Bad Content: When the user doesn't find the information he's looking for, he'll leave in no time. This will happen fast and constantly, as long as the content stays bad. The only thing that helps when that's the case is revising the content.
- Long Loading Times: Most visitors will not accept a long loading time of your website. If the content is not visible after two seconds at most, the user will leave the page. On top of that, it will also be harder to find the website using Google search.
- Too Good SEO: Yes, even a (too) good search engine optimization can cause a high bounce rate. When the user instantly finds the information he's looking for, he won't click any further pages either.
- Poor Webdesign: When your website's layout isn't all that inviting, or even looks sketchy, the visitor will quickly leave the page. An appealing layout is a must for every website.
- Too Many Advertisements: If a website contains too many ads, this can scare away potential visitors. Less is definitely more in this regard!
- Confusing Navigation: If your visitor simply doesn't find his way around on your website, he'll leave it quickly as well.
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Are High Bounce Rates Affecting the Ranking?
I think we can answer this question with a definitive yes very easily. Google analyzes the bounce rate in-depth, taking into account that a high bounce rate is not always bad. For that reason, the search engine will also take the duration of the visit on the page into consideration. Only then, a coherent picture is created. When a visitor leaves a website after a couple seconds, that's always bad. However, if he leaves after five or ten minutes, that's a very good sign. It only means that the visitor found just what he was looking for.How to Achieve a Realistic Bounce Rate
Google considers every visitor that leaves the website after just one page a bounce. Thus, the bounce rate increases no matter how long the visitor stayed on that one page. He could be a regular reader, who accessed the page via the website's feed only to read this one article, as he's already read the others. It is also possible that the visitor came from Twitter. All direct visits to a website are a sign of specific interest. While this is generally a good thing, these users unfortunately also drive up the bounce rate. I think that the standard way of measuring the bounce rate gives a false impression, and doesn't display a website's reality. A real bounce would be somewhere between five and twenty seconds. The bounce rate is supposed to be significant, as it's a good tool for website optimization. It is supposed to help you find problems. This can only be done when the bounce rate is realistic. That's why we need to adjust and "tune" it a little. Using the following tracking code, by simply replacing the existing one, we decide, that only visits below twenty seconds are counted as a bounce. Clicking the graphics opens the respective Gist at GitHub.Adjusting the new Google Analytics Code - analytics.js
Adjusting the old ga.js Analytics Code
The Effects of the New Code
After a short time, we'll have a more realistic bounce rate at hand. Only the real bounces below 20 seconds are displayed.
Conclusion
With a small adjustment to the tracking code, you have now achieved realistic, though probably still high bounce rates that will be displayed in Google Analytics. Using the new values, you can now revise the articles with "real" high bounce rates, and start working on the problems (if there are any).Sources:
- Google Analytics Help
- Using Time-Based Bounce Rate for SEO (German)
- Lowering the Google Analytics Bounce Rate (German)
- A Realistic Bounce Rate in Google Analytics (German)
- Website Optimization: The First Steps (German)
- Adjusting Bounce Rate in Google Analytics
- Documentation: Analytics for Web (ga.js)
- Documentation: Analytics for Web (analytics.js)
Interesting article Andreas,
I would also give a try to changing Analytics code. My current bounce rate is about 76%, that is huge. hope after changing the code I will get a clear picture.
High bounce rate is always a bad signal. You explained the reasons to have a high bounce rate in a very good way.
I am going to tweak my analytic code right now to see lower numbers. Thanks for the quick tweak.
I hope it would go down when I will open my analytic tomorrow morning. :)
Great points and article. You mentioned a few good reasons for bounce rates being high and there’s many more but one that you didn’t cover that sticks out to me is the length of the articles on a web site. If the site only has articles that are short and quick to read the bounce rate will higher then articles that are lengthy and in depth.
Really good article for SEO. Thank you
Hi Andreas
Thanks for this good read
In my experience it’s the page download speed (or at least the perceived speed : ie show the user that something is loading and manage their expectations) that has by far the biggest impact on bounce rates. Get your download speed zippy and you’ll see an improvement in bounce rates…and of course all other metrics of your site !
Bounce Rate is the Important Ranking factor now a days. We can’t ignore this if we really want to dominate Search Engines.
This is very good tweak with Google Analytics to reduce the Bounce Rate.
Apart from it, I have few suggestions to reduce Bounce rate. Here are they
1. Write long and in depth article to fulfill the user’s query.
2. Interlinking
3. Try to Embed media like images, infographic, relevant video in your article.
Hope you all like these suggestions also.
Please let me know what other thinks?
Adjusting your font smaller makes your visitor have more time in your site. Thus the bounce rate decreases
I think this is the method so many blogger uses smaller font size.
This somehow does not show the exact bounce rate. I had tried this on my site and result was below 10%. This is not the correct count and leads to some modification to analytics code. I replaced this with old one.
Bounce rate is an important factor and every webmaster depends upon the real %age of bounce rate in order to modify site accordingly.
Hey,
That was great post. Well I’m having the bounce rate of over 82%. I just give a try with your plan and let you know weather it works for me or not.
Google analytics is really a helpful tool. I heard about bounce rate but never get such info to reduce it.
Thanks for great article Andreas.