High Bounce Rate in Google Analytics
I used to tell all my clients that if you have a high bounce rate in Google Analytics, there is a good chance there are issues with your site: broken pages, broken links, no call to action, or no visual appeal. That all changed this year. Starting in January, all my clients’ bounce rates doubled. I spent a lot of time investigating and discovered the issue was spammers or black hat SEO companies. These companies are trying to get you to purchase their services.
I will walk you through the steps to find out what is actually affecting your bounce rate.
- Log into Google Analytics.
- Click on your company name in order to see your dashboard (or you may see ALL WEBSITE DATA).
3. Once in your Overview, look in the left-hand side in the gray column for Acquisitions> ALL TRAFFIC and then click on REFERRALS.
4. You can see similar information under the SOURCE/MEDIUM report, which is located right below REFERRALS.
Once you click on REFERRALS, you will be brought to a new screen. In the lower half of the screen, you will see the names of all the other websites that are referring to you. DO NOT CLICK ON THEIR NAMES. If you click on them you will be brought to their website. This gives them more visits and could possibly help their ranking in Google, which we do not want. If you are curious about the website, you can copy/paste their name into Google (leaving off the .com part of the name).
You can see in the results above that this site has visits from:
get-your-social-buttons.info
adf.ly
claim52626807.copyrightclaims.org
santasgift.ml
site42865932.snip.to
They all have bounce rates of 100 percent. If you mix your real traffic with all of these 100 percent bounce rates, your averages will also raise significantly.
If you want to save the report to easily find later, do the following:
A few buttons are next to the name at the top of every report. One of these is SHORTCUTS.
Click on SHORTCUTS and give it a name. Later, when you go into Google Analytics, you will be able to find the report at the top of the gray sidebar on the left.
