If you’ve ever had to ask yourself, “Why is my bounce rate over 100?” then I feel your frustration. Thankfully this is an issue that can be fixed! Let’s dive into why this happens and what to do about it.
Why Is My Bounce Rate over 100?
A bounce rate higher than 100 can be the result of your analytics seeing more visitor exits than entries. It can stem from a technical issue, unexpected user behavior, or even your content!
Let’s take a look at the actionable steps you can take to lower your bounce rate and what this will mean to your website’s traffic and performance.
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Understanding Bounce Rate and How It’s Calculated
So what is bounce rate?
The dictionary defines it as the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A one-and-done visit to your site. Ouch.
So as an example, a 60% bounce rate percentage means that out of 100 visitors to your website, 60 left after seeing just one page.
Average bounce rates range anywhere from 26%-70%. Once you get in the 60% range, that’s getting high, and If you have an extremely high bounce rate (90% or higher) it’s time to check what is scaring everyone off!
So how can it be possible to have a bounce rate OVER 100%? How can more visitor exits happen than visitor entries?
The good news is that it’s almost always an analytics technical issue. Let’s first take a look at reason a high bounce rate happens.
Common Reasons for a High Bounce Rate
When you have a high bounce rate it means your content just isn’t ENGAGING your audience! Here are the 5 most common reasons that can happen:
- Slow loading times. If your website is slow and takes too long to load, guess what? Your audience is BOUNCING! The difference between a 1 second and 3 second load time drives bounce rates WAY up!
- Poor Mobile Optimization. Just about everyone nowadays is online via mobile. Make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices! If your audience can’t read or navigate your site, they’re bouncing.
- Misleading Content. Have you ever arrived at a website and you instantly realize the title was click bait? Don’t ever do this to your audience! Be on point!
- Pop ups. This for SURE has happened to me. If I arrive at a website and annoying pop ups fill my screen, I’m out!
- Poor user experience. Overall bounce rate is a direct reflection of user experience. If you have broken links, a wall of text, or just unclear direction, your audience will get frustrated and leave without seeing more.
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Technical Issues that Can Inflate a Bounce Rate over 100%
Now let’s talk technical. I’ve shown why a high bounce rate can happen, but an INFLATED bounce rate is a whole other story.
Here are the top 3 technical issues that can cause this:
- Duplicate tracking codes. Multiple tracking codes on a single page can cause analytics to count multiple visits from a single person. If you do use tracking codes, keep it to one per page.
- Incorrect tracking settings. Personally, I don’t deal with tracking codes, but some allow you to dive into their settings. Done incorrectly, it can cause the more exits than entries issue.
- Cross-domain tracking issues. If you have internal links that take your audience to a different subdomain, this could cause analytics to think they’re leaving completely. Again, make sure your tracking settings are correct.
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Reasons Your Content May Be Driving Visitors Away
While technical tracking issues can inflate your bounce rate to over 100%, let’s not forget that your very own CONTENT can be helping to drive them away too!
- Not Enough white space. Don’t hit your readers with a wall of text! Let your content breathe! Arriving at a website like that will make them back out immediately!
- Poor internal linking. This is almost so obvious that you can forget about it! Without internal linking your audience literally can’t dive deeper into your website if they wanted to!
- Poor content quality. Misspelled words, poor grammar, and lack of a clear thought process in your writing will have readers wondering why they even bothered clicking on your content. Take the time to make sure your writing is on point!
Strategies for Reducing Bounce Rate & Improving Engagement
Guess what? Now that you know the common causes to a high bounce rate, fixing it is relatively straightforward and simple.
- Improve any page speed issues. Slow loading times can be the result of lack of image optimization, code not being minified, and even hosting.
- High quality content. If your audience is arriving at your post and you’re instantly delivering on answering their question, they’re going to be SATISFIED and looking for more!
- Optimize for mobile. More and more of your audience are finding your content from their smart phone or tablet. Make sure your website is optimized for a great mobile device user experience!
- Improve website navigation. Always make sure your website is easy to navigate. Clear menus, good internal linking, and a straightforward way of getting to your content will greatly improve your bounce rate.
- Use multimedia in your posts. A quick and easy way to have your audience stick around is incorporating VIDEO into your posts. Embedding YouTube content is easy and, trust me, your audience LOVES video!
- Exit intent pop ups. Exit intent pop ups show up right as the user is exiting the page. If you have a high bounce rate, maybe consider utilizing a pop up that offers something (free gift, discount, etc.) that encourages them to stay and look around more.
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Final Thoughts
A bounce rate over 100% is almost always related to a technical tracking issue. To further lower your bounce rate, always aim to create high quality content that stirs up engagement.
Make your website easy to navigate, optimized, and with solid internal linking and you’re sure to see traffic, conversions, and revenue improve.
How’s your website’s bounce rate? Have you been able to fix your bounce rate using the methods mentioned above? What methods have you used that I didn’t list?
Leave your comments and questions in the comments section below! I’d love to hear what you think and I always respond.
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hey, My bounce rate is rather hight at the moment.:) I was wondering if it is because my website is new and under 6 months old? would improving the quality of my content on my blog articles keep readers.on my website for longer, so they don’t leave so soon ?
keep up the great work
cheers Matt h.
Your bounce rate doesn’t have anything to do with how old your website is. It’s based 100% on how many people leave your website after just one page visited. So, of course, if you maintain high quality content on your site they’ll be eager to search around your other articles and find more. Thanks for the comment!
2 things Eric, 1st I’m so thankful I found this post tonight. I was wondering why my bounce rates on many of my pages have been hovering between 56-100% and I fear that I may have solved it from your article.
That said, the second thing leads me to this question: Do newer websites (for example less than 6 months old) usually carry a high bounce rate due to the fact there is less traffic being led towards it?
Because following your suggestions, and knowing that I have No annoying pop-ups (except for a late “hello bar” pop up offering early blog posts), I seem to have high bounce rates and I’ve tried almost all the things you’ve mentioned.
This was my only conclusion, but I could be wrong.
Bounce rate doesn’t have anything to do with the amount of traffic being led to a post. If you had 2 posts and the little to no traffic you had was all people coming in and checking out both posts your bounce rate would be 0%. It’s all about people arriving and then bouncing without checking out anything else. Internal linking helps a ton. Maybe just take a look at your site with fresh eyes and see what could be pushing them away…
I’m still learning the ropes of running my own website. Knowing about things like bounce rate and how to fix it if it is over 100 or possibly avoid it from getting to 100 early on, is super helpful.
I especially appreciate the points you listed under Strategies for reducing bounce rate and improving engagement. These are practical points one can easily apply even for a beginner.
How do I see my bounce rate?
You can see your bounce rate from Google Analytics 🙂 I’m not huge on worrying about analytics early on, but once you have maybe 15-20 articles, you can start to check it out maybe monthly. Thanks for the comment!