Sudden Jump in Bounce Rate since Tuesday

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   eugbugposted 24 months ago

   I wonder what caused this? Bounce rate increased from about 60% to 80%
   
   

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      Gregory DeVictorposted 24 months agoin reply to this

      My bounce rate has been stuck at 57-58% now forever and a day. Now it is 49.13%, the lowest it has been in a very long time. Does that mean that my SEO experiment is starting to work? Well, I'm skeptical about that, all things considered.

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   eugbugposted 24 months ago

   This is how it has changed over the last 5 years.
   
   
   

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   eugbugposted 24 months ago

   The jump in bounce rate seems to have occurred on articles on Dengarden. Average time on page has fallen for most articles too. Maybe the video was keeping readers engaged, increasing the time on page? (but not necessarily the time actually reading content proper).
   
   Edit: If a reader watched the title video, that could have been be considered an event, so a bounce wouldn't be registered. So the video being removed probably explains this hike in bounce rates. It seems likely the video was keeping bounce rate artificially low. Load speed might be the reason now why it's high again, rather than ads. Alternatively in my articles, excessive detailed content at the beginning might be just turning off readers and making them leave. But how do you write a thorough guide without adding plenty of "helpful content" as Google calls it?
   
   
   

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      chef-de-jourposted 24 months agoin reply to this

      This, direct from Google Analytics:
      
      Is a high bounce rate a bad thing?
      It depends.
      
      If the success of your site depends on users viewing more than one page, then, yes, a high bounce rate is bad. For example, if your home page is the gateway to the rest of your site (e.g., news articles, product pages, your checkout process) and a high percentage of users are viewing only your home page, then you don’t want a high bounce rate.
      
      On the other hand, if you have a single-page site like a blog, or offer other types of content for which single-page sessions are expected, then a high bounce rate is perfectly normal.
      
      https://support.google.com/analytics/an … %20server.

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         eugbugposted 24 months agoin reply to this

         That true. People may also just open a new tab on desktop to view a webpage, then close it after they're finished with the page, which can be considered as a bounce.

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      Em Clarkposted 24 months agoin reply to this

      Who knows but I'm in agreement on the video theory. Personally, those videos would cause me to scroll really fast past them because they'd freeze my screen. So it looked like I was clicking through when really I was just avoiding the video and then getting out as fast as I could to avoid the page freezing up.

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      Gregory DeVictorposted 24 months agoin reply to this

      Several weeks ago, I disabled the advertising for my 10 lowest-performing Hobbylark articles. (These were for articles that had between 10-35 average daily page views.) I wanted to see if my page views over time would increase and whether or not my bounce rate would decrease. After three weeks of experimenting, my traffic did not increase, but my bounce rate decreased from 57-58% down to about 49%. I have not seen a bounce rate that low in a very long time.
      
      Did my bounce rate decrease because the readers for 10 of my articles were not distracted by lots of ads, and did not leave the page as quickly as they might have otherwise? I don't know. But I am amazed about this lower bounce rate.
      
      Obviously, the video was still at the top of each article, which distracted a reader's attention span. Also, I noticed that for the articles with no ads, the big white spaces that used to break up my text were gone when I looked at an article on my phone.
      
      On Wednesday of this week, I enabled the advertising again for the 10 articles to see what would happen to my overall bounce rate over time. Yesterday, I believe that my bounce rate was 49.13%. Today, it is up to 50.70%. Is this gradual increase due to the ads appearing again. I'm not sure, but time might tell the story.

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         eugbugposted 24 months agoin reply to this

         How long do you see white spaces for before ads/images load? Is this on mobile device or desktop?

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            Gregory DeVictorposted 24 months agoin reply to this

            Maybe it's my phone, but it can take up to 45 seconds for those white spaces to disappear.

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               eugbugposted 24 months agoin reply to this

               It's similar for me. I reckon lots of readers just back out because of the slowness of sites. I compress my images before uploading, even still they take ages to display when I view an article. Even pages with few images fail performances tests.

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                  Gregory DeVictorposted 24 months agoin reply to this

                  When I was checking my Google rankings yesterday on the 32-inch monitor, I just sat patiently and waited to see what would happen when I clicked on the text link for one of my Hobbylark articles.
                  
                  That's a powerful computer, but it still took about 10-15 seconds for the video to load, as well as the ads at both the top and bottom of the screen. That's enough right there for a lot of readers just to get off the page and go elsewhere.
                  
                  Do you remember the Google update from way back that I believe was called the "Page Layout Algorithm Update?" I believe that under the terms of the update, web pages with an abundance of advertising above the fold would be penalized. Could this be one of the reasons why the HP niches are being punished right now? Or, is that page layout update null and void now? What do you think?

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                     eugbugposted 24 months agoin reply to this

                     More than likely. A page that takes over 5 seconds to load is classed as slow. Any of the tests I've run give times of 20 seconds or more. People just aren't going to wait around that long. I guess the problem is that optimising or rewriting the code would be a monumental task. Text loads fast, the issue is with rendering images and there are lots of ways things can be done differently to speed up the process. I don't fully understand the technicalities, but most revolve around removing the necessity of a browser to rescale images and similar. Serving up of ads is also very slow, I don't know how that could be improved.

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                        Gregory DeVictorposted 24 months agoin reply to this

                        I didn't realize that a page that takes longer than five seconds to load is considered to be slow. I also didn't realize that the "Serving up of ads is also very slow." This is obviously a serious problem with all of the HP niches. Who wants to see an ad for Sephora.com at least 12 times on the same page?
                        
                        Referencing the page layout update, I cannot find anything on the Internet that answers the following question: If there is an overabundance of ads above the fold or even on a single webpage, does the webpage get penalized or does the entire website get penalized?

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                           eugbugposted 24 months agoin reply to this

                           Personally the overabundance of ads isn't the thing that mainly annoys me. It's the slow loading and the way ads split up text, often getting shoved into any old place, even in the middle of a bullet list. They essentially "look for" a paragraph break and get placed after the end of a line and the start of a new paragraph. I don't know whether an excess of ads is a problem as regards Google. I guess excessive density, i.e. the number of ads per line of text or number of images, rather than the absolute number of ads would be a problem. If an article is very long, it presumably can take more ads without Google penalising the page.

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                              Gregory DeVictorposted 24 months agoin reply to this

                              I agree 100% with you that about the problem of ads breaking up bulleted and/or numbered lists. It happens to me all the time. I also understand what you mean by ads being placed at the end of a line.
                              
                              Additionally, I have issues with large ads being placed above or below my images. It can be very confusing for readers who are not familiar with my article, or anybody's article, for that matter.
                              
                              My nostalgia articles tend to be long, with as many as 25 different categories overall. Many of these categories contain bulleted or numbered lists, and the lists are constantly broken up with ads.
                              
                              Many times, I have checked on some of my major competitors to see how their pages are laid out. Yes, there are ads, but the ads do not break up bulleted or numbered lists, and tend to be "tastefully" positioned throughout the webpage. Plus, these competitors do not have the videos at the top of their pages. I sometimes get jealous.

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                                 eugbugposted 24 months agoin reply to this

                                 If you want to force an ad out of a place you don't want it, use shift enter instead of enter. This makes a new line rather than a new paragraph. Unfortunately this can't be done for bullet/numbered lists. You could probably use images made from white rectangles to increase the space  space between ads and photos. A reader wouldn't see the image (although a Pinterest button would appear on mouse hover over the image).

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                                    Gregory DeVictorposted 24 months agoin reply to this

                                    I never knew anything about shift + enter. That's quite fascinating. I'll have to reread your post above and maybe try it. I'll have to do it in the edit mode, correct? I'm new at this.
                                    
                                    It's too bad that it can't be done for bulleted or numbered lists. Perhaps that's where my real objection to ads lies.

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                                       eugbugposted 24 months agoin reply to this

                                       Yes, in edit mode.

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                                          Gregory DeVictorposted 24 months agoin reply to this

                                          When using your phone, did you notice that your ads are loading faster now that the video, etc. has been removed? It isn't instantaneous, but it is better now.

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                                             eugbugposted 24 months agoin reply to this

                                             Maybe a little faster. However I notice when I reach a white space sometimes, it seems to go on and on forever (although none of the images are excessively tall vertically). So I don't know where I am in the scroll because there's nothing on the screen.

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                                                Gregory DeVictorposted 24 months agoin reply to this

                                                I just checked several of my Hobbylark article on my phone, and it took 15-20 seconds for the ads to load. That's better than it's been for me.

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                                                   Gregory DeVictorposted 24 months agoin reply to this

                                                   Edit: On my phone, it is taking more like 30-35 seconds for the first ad to load. That's only a slight difference between the old rate.

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   PaulGoodman67posted 24 months ago

   I'm not sure what's going on.
   
   Obviously, we've got the new message on the earnings page about impressions not being fully reported over the last week.
   
   I suspect that they're working on certain niches and it might be distorting various stats.
   
   It's difficult to know anything unless they tell us.

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   eugbugposted 24 months ago

   A technique that used to be used for displaying images on slow connections, that I don't see as often now, was to show a lo-res, pixelated image that eventually became higher resolution. The problem though is that connection speed (in my case) isn't slow, it just seems that either the server has a lag in serving up images, or the browser is slow to render them.

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   eugbugposted 24 months ago

   I discovered what those really tall white spaces are. It's when there are several images together or ads and images, one after the other. Once you run into them, you're not sure whether you're still scrolling down or the screen is stuck.

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   eugbugposted 24 months ago

   I just did a test. I turned off ads on an article with lots of images, cleared the cache on my browser and reloaded the page. Images loaded fast. So it seems that ads are slowing down the loading.

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      Gregory DeVictorposted 24 months agoin reply to this

      Later this morning, I am going to check my Google rankings on one of those computers with the 32-inch monitor. I'll let you know what's what with the loading of ads, images, etc. It will be interesting to see my articles without the video on one of those monitors.

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