Hello community. I am reaching out to see if anyone is or has experienced a bounce rate issue I have been dealing with.
My site is hosted with Webflow.
Since I first published my site in 2019 to February 17th 2021 my sites bounce rate was ~1.5%. Starting on February 18th to date my bounce rate skyrocketed to around 80%. My site visits, page views have dropped since that time.
I have been trying to understand what has happened since the bounce rate spike but I am coming up empty handed.
I had no significant change to the site at that time.
Have you all experienced this or have any thoughts?
Unfortunately it’s going to be difficult to diagnose any change in bounce rate without a bit more information on the specifics of the site. Are you running paid advertisements or is this all from organic traffic? Are you using Google Analytics or some other metric tool? If you’re using GA, did you upgrade to the newest version?
Your analytics should give you an idea of the site performance so assuming that’s unchanged around the same time then I’d guess the bounces are either due to a change in how they’re measured or a tweak you made in advertising. If you’re lucky enough to get a bunch of organic traffic, then it’s possible that the site is now relevant for keywords that don’t accurately reflect the content of the site.
Admittedly I’m not too keen on analytic updates, but some quick research suggests that a bounce rate that low is due to an issue with the tracking data as typically something around 25-40% is considered “excellent”. That may also back up the changes to your site visits and page views, although I wouldn’t rule out some of my suggestions above.
Outside of that, it appears that Google is doing away with bounce rate in GA4 as they found it’s not an entirely accurate metric and instead replacing it with “Engagement”. I’m not sure if that relates to your situation, but it’s something to consider when digesting the site reports.
Hopefully that helps give a bit of insight, but keep in mind I’m by no means an expert—measuring analytics is a skill in and of itself. I’m happy to talk through anything else if you’ve got other questions/thoughts, but if this is causing a significant hit to your business it may be beneficial to chat with an experienced professional.
“Unfortunately it’s going to be difficult to diagnose”
Agreed. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
“Are you running paid advertisements or is this all from organic traffic?”
Most of our traffic comes through Google Adwords
“Are you using Google Analytics or some other metric tool? If you’re using GA, did you upgrade to the newest version?”
Yes, both old and GA4 are running. I see what you mean when you say their focus is on engagement.
I was thinking the same thing. I noticed that my conversions have been dropping recently as well. After speaking with a representative from Google I learned that my quality score has dropped 18% since February. That may help give insight into why my traffic and leads are dwindling. The representative suggested this quality drop from a high bounce rate. So, for what that’s’ worth.
Thank you for your response. I will continue looking into what may have caused a spike overnight. Cheers!
Kelly, without doing an analysis on the domain / home page and then each landing page then this is all just conjecture and generalities. If you are spending money on PPC traffic then figuring this out should not be left to a forum topic. Hire a professional to help you resolve the issue. It’s not cheap but neither is PPC spend and the lost potential of leads not realized.
On a regular basis Google is tweaking it’s algorithm. Remember that at the end of the day Google wants to stuff its coffers. Something that has not changed since they rolled out Adwords in 2000. It sure was a lot easier to rock Adwords back then!
