SEO
Understanding Bounce Rate & How to Audit It
Many people talk about how important it is to have a “low bounce rate.”
But bounce rate is one of the most misunderstood metrics in SEO and digital marketing.
This article will explore the complexities of bounce rate and why it’s not as straightforward as you might think.
You’ll also learn how to analyze your bounce using Google Analytics 4 exploration reports.
In order to understand what bounce rate is, we need to define what engaged sessions are according to GA4.
What Is An Engaged Session?
An engaged session in GA4 is a session which meets either of the following criteria:
- Lasts at least 10 seconds.
- Has key event (formerly conversions).
- Has at least two screen views (or pageviews).
Simply put, if a user lands on your homepage and leaves without converting (key event), that would produce a 100 percent bounce rate for that session.
If one lands and visits a second page or signs up for your newsletter (as you defined it as a key event), that would mean the bounce rate for that session is 0%.
What Is Bounce Rate In Google Analytics?
Bounce rate is a percentage of unengaged sessions, and it is calculated with the following formula:
(total sessions/unengaged sessions)*100.
So, it’s not only visiting a second page that brings the bounce rate down but also when key events occur.
You can set up any event, either built-in or custom-defined in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), to count as a key event (formerly conversion), and in cases when it occurs during the session, it will be counted as a non-bounce visit.
Here is how to define any event as a key event:
- Navigate to Admin.
- Under Data display, navigate to Events.
- Find the event you are interested in and toggle Mark as key event to turn it blue.
-
How to mark events as key events in GA.
How To Change The Default Engaged Session Timer In GA4
As a marketer, you may want to adjust the default 10-second timer for engaged sessions based on your project needs.
For example, if you have a blog article, you may want to set the timer as high as 20 seconds, but if you have a product page where users typically take more time to explore details, you might increase the timer to 30 seconds to better reflect user engagement.
To change:
- Navigate to Data streams and click on the stream.
- In the slide popup, navigate to Configure tag settings.
- In the second slide popup, click Show more at the bottom.
- Click on the Adjust session timeout setting.
- Change Adjust timer for engaged sessions to the value of your choice.
Here is the detailed video guide on how to adjust the timer for engaged sessions:
What Is A Good Bounce Rate?
So, it’s not as straightforward as saying, “Example.com has a bounce rate of 43 percent, and example2.com has a bounce rate of 20 percent; therefore, example2.com performs better.”
For example, if you search [what’s on at the cinema…], then land on a website and have to dig through five pages of the site to find what’s showing, the website might have a low bounce rate but will have a poor user experience.
In this case, that’s misleading if you consider a low bounce rate good.
On top of that, what use is there in measuring the bounce rate for the whole website when you have lots of different templates that are laid out and designed in different ways, and you track ‘key events,’ aka conversions, differently?
In most cases, this shows that your marketing is effective and well-targeted, and visitors are engaging with your content and wanting to know more.
Remember, bounce rate is not a ranking factor, but when users navigate deeper into your pages, it is an engagement ranking signal that Google may take into account, according to what Google’s Pandu Nayak said during hearings.
That said, it may make sense to track the number of sessions with two or more pageviews in GA4, which you may want to consider as a KPI when reporting.
How To Set Up A Custom Audience With Multiple Pageviews Per Session
If you want to know how many visitors you have who have more than two page views in a session, you can easily set it up in GA4.
To do that:
- Navigate to Admin.
- Under Data display, navigate to Audiences.
- Click the New Audience blue button on the top right corner.
- Click Create custom audience.
- Set up a name for your audience.
- Select scope to “Within the same session.”
- Select session_start.
- Click And and select “page_views” with the parameter with “Event count” greater than one.
You simply tell it to add to my audience all users who viewed more than two pages within the same session. Here is a quick video guide on how to do that.
You can set up audiences with any granularity, like sessions with exactly two or three pageviews and greater than three pageviews.
Later, you can filter your standard reports using your custom audiences.
How To Do Bounce Rate Reporting And Audit
Next time your boss or client asks you, “Why is my bounce rate so high?” – first, send them this article.
Second, conduct an in-depth bounce rate audit to understand what’s going on.
Here’s how I do it.
Bounce Rate by Date Range
Look at bounce rates on your website for a particular period. This is the most simple reporting on bounce rate.
To do that:
- Navigate to Explorations on the right-side menu.
- Click ‘Blank’ report.
- From Metrics choose “Bounce rate.”
- Set Values to a “Bounce rate.”
- Under Settings (2nd column), choose visualization type “Line chart.”
- Select the date period of your choice.
-
How to set up a bounce rate report for the entire website by date range.
If you see spikes in the chart, it may indicate a change you made to the website that influenced the bounce rate.
How To Analyze Bounce Rate On A Page Level
When running a lead generation campaign on many different landing pages, evaluating which pages convert well or poorly is vital to optimize them for better performance.
Another example use case of page-level bounce reports is A/B testing.
To do that:
- Navigate to Explorations on the right-side menu.
- Click Blank report.
- From Metrics, choose Bounce rate and Sessions.
- From Dimensions, choose Landing page + query string.
- Under Settings (second column), choose visualization type ‘Table.”
- Set Rows to a “Landing page + query string.”
- Set Values to a “Bounce rate: and “Sessions.”
- Set the filter to include pages with more than 100 sessions ( to ensure the data you’re mining is statistically significant).
- Select the date period of your choice.
Tip: You don’t need to create a new blank exploration report; instead, add another tab to the same report and change only the configuration.
How to set up page level-bounce rate report.If we don’t filter by sessions number, you’ll be looking at bounce rates on some pages with only one or two sessions, which doesn’t tell you anything.
Once you’ve done the above, repeat the process per channel to gain an even more rounded understanding of what content/source combinations produce the most or least engaged visits.
How To Analyze Your Bounce Rates By Traffic Channel
Bounce rates can be wildly different depending on the source of traffic.
For example, it’s likely that search traffic will produce a low bounce rate while social and display traffic might produce a high bounce rate.
So you also have to consider bounce rate on a channel level as well as on a page level.
The bounce rate from social and display is almost always higher than “inbound” channels for these reasons:
- When a user is on social media looking through their news feed, they are (often) not actively looking for what we are promoting.
- When a user sees a banner ad on another website, they are (often) not actively looking for what we are promoting.
However, for inbound channels like organic and paid search, it’s logical that the bounce rate is lower as these users are actively searching for what you are promoting.
So, you capture their attention during the “doing” phase of their buyer’s journey (depending on the search term in question).
To dig deeper into each one:
- From Metrics, choose Bounce rate and Sessions.
- From Dimensions, choose Session default channel group.
- Under Settings (second column), choose visualization type Table.
- Set Rows to a Session default channel group.
- Set Values to a Bounce rate and Sessions.
- Select the date period of your choice.
-
How to set up a bounce rate report by traffic channels.
A little homework: Try to plot a line graph based on the bounce rate for your organic traffic.
Now, you can dig deeper into the data and look for patterns or reasons that one page or set of pages/source or set of sources has a higher or lower bounce rate.
Compile the information in an easy-to-read format, ping it to the powers that be, and head for a congratulatory coffee.
Do You Have The Right Intent?
Sometimes, you’ll find pages that rank in search engines for terms that have more than one meaning.
For example, a recent one I discovered was a page on a website I manage that ranks first for the search term ‘Alang Alang’ (the name of a villa), but Alang Alang is also the name of a film.
The villa page had a high bounce rate, and one reason for this is that some of the visitors landing on that page were actually looking for the film, not the villa.
By doing keyword and competition research to see what results your target keywords produce, you can quickly understand if you have any pages that rank well for terms that could be intended for other topics.
When you identify such pages, you have three options:
- Completely change your keyword targeting.
- Remove the page from the SERPs.
- Overhaul your title and meta description, so searchers know explicitly what the page is about before they click.
How To Increase Website Engagement
Now you’ve figured out what’s going wrong, you’re all set to make some changes.
All of this depends on your study’s findings, so not all of these points are relevant to every scenario, but this should be a good starting point.
Most importantly track custom events as “key events” (conversions) so things like newsletter sign-ups result in Google Analytics classifying that as a non-bounce even if the user didn’t visit a second page.
Is High Bounce Rate Bad?
Hopefully, you now understand why bounce rate isn’t simply “high” or “low”. It depends on many factors, and there is no single answer to the question, “Is high bounce rate bad?”
If you defined your ‘key events’ (conversions) and GA4 settings correctly for your goals, a high bounce ( +90% ) rate is definitely concerning because it means your visitors don’t engage enough with your webpages.
But if you have GA4 on default settings, you can never rely on data because of the reasons we discussed above.
Never assume anything. Do your research and make sure you configure your GA4 account properly to track ‘key events.’
Now, go forth and conquer your bounce rate!
More resources:
Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.
The new guide has six sections:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment
The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.
Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.
To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.
The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.
Google explains:
“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”
Read the new Google Trends documentation:
Get started with Google Trends
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero
SEO
All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024
Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.
What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?”
Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.
Let’s go!
OUR HUGE SCREEN
The largest presentation screen I’ve ever seen! #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/oboiMFW1TN
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is the biggest presentation screen I ever seen in my life. It’s like iMax for SEO presentations. #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/sAfZ1rtePx
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF
It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.
The Ahrefs conference venue feels like being in inception. #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/18Yjai1Cej
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
I’m in Singapore for @ahrefs Evolve this week. Keen to connect with people doing interesting work on the future of search / AI #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/s00UkIbxpf
— Alex Denning (@AlexDenning) October 23, 2024
OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
“would I even do this if Google didn’t exist?” – what a great question to assess if you actually have the right focus when creating content amazing presentation from @amandaecking at #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/a6OKbKxwiS
— Aleyda Solis ️ (@aleyda) October 24, 2024
Attending @CyrusShepard ‘s talk on WTF is Helpful Content in Google’s algorithm at #AhrefsEvolve
“Focus on people first content”
Super relevant for content creators who want to stay ahead of the ever evolving Google search curve! #SEOTalk #SEO pic.twitter.com/KRTL13SB0g
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
— Parth Suba (@parthsuba77) October 24, 2024
@thinking_slows thoughts on AI content – “it’s very good if you want to be average”.
We can do a lot better and Ryan explains how. Love it @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/qFqWs6QBH5
— Andy Chadwick (@digitalquokka) October 24, 2024
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
GREAT MUSIC
First time I’ve ever Shazam’d a track during SEO conference ambience…. and the track wasn’t even Shazamable! #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs pic.twitter.com/ZDzJOZMILt
— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) October 24, 2024
AMAZING GOODIES
Ahrefs Evolveきました！@ahrefs @AhrefsJP #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/33EiejQPdX
— さくらぎ (@sakuragi_ksy) October 24, 2024
Aside from the very interesting topics, what makes this conference even cooler are the ton of awesome freebies
Kudos for making all of these happen for #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs team pic.twitter.com/DGzk5FSTN8
— Krista Melgarejo (@kimelgarejo) October 24, 2024
Content Goblin and SEO alligator party stickers are definitely going on my laptop. @ahrefs #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/QBsBuY5Yix
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is one of the best swag bags I’ve received at any conference!
Either @ahrefs actually cares or the other conference swag bags aren’t up to par w Ahrefs!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/Yc9e6wZPHn— Moses Sanchez (@SanchezMoses) October 25, 2024
SELFIE BATTLE
Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!
Got the rare selfie with both @timsoulo and @samsgoh #AhrefsEvolve
— Bernard Huang (@bernardjhuang) October 24, 2024
THAT BELL
Everybody’s just waiting for this one.
@timsoulo @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/6ypWaTGDDP
— Jinbo Liang (@JinboLiang) October 24, 2024
STICKER WALL
Viva la vida, viva Seo!
Awante Argentina loco!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/sfhbI2kWSH
— Gaston Riera. (@GastonRiera) October 24, 2024
AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!
#AhrefsEvolve let’s goooooooooooo!!! pic.twitter.com/THtdvdtUyB
— Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) October 24, 2024
–
There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!
