Sudden Jump in Bounce Rate since Tuesday

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  1. eugbug profile image97
    eugbugposted 2 years ago

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

    https://usercontent1.hubstatic.com/16226748_f1024.jpg

    1. Gregory DeVictor profile image99
      Gregory DeVictorposted 2 years 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.

  2. eugbug profile image97
    eugbugposted 2 years ago

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


    https://hubstatic.com/16227399_f1024.jpg

  3. eugbug profile image97
    eugbugposted 2 years 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?


    https://hubstatic.com/16227492_f1024.jpg

    1. chef-de-jour profile image99
      chef-de-jourposted 2 years 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.

      1. eugbug profile image97
        eugbugposted 2 years 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.

    2. Em Clark profile image88
      Em Clarkposted 2 years 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.

    3. Gregory DeVictor profile image99
      Gregory DeVictorposted 2 years 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.

      1. eugbug profile image97
        eugbugposted 2 years agoin reply to this

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

        1. Gregory DeVictor profile image99
          Gregory DeVictorposted 2 years agoin reply to this

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

          1. eugbug profile image97
            eugbugposted 2 years 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.

            1. Gregory DeVictor profile image99
              Gregory DeVictorposted 2 years 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?

              1. eugbug profile image97
                eugbugposted 2 years 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.

                1. Gregory DeVictor profile image99
                  Gregory DeVictorposted 2 years 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?

                  1. eugbug profile image97
                    eugbugposted 2 years 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.

  4. PaulGoodman67 profile image98
    PaulGoodman67posted 2 years 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.

  5. eugbug profile image97
    eugbugposted 2 years 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.

  6. eugbug profile image97
    eugbugposted 2 years 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.

  7. eugbug profile image97
    eugbugposted 2 years 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.

    1. Gregory DeVictor profile image99
      Gregory DeVictorposted 2 years 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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