Depending on your website and your goals, Adsense can be a bad idea for many different reasons. However, there was one thing that everyone seems to agree on and that is Adsense increases your website’s bounce rate.
Perhaps it’s different for different sites, but it turns out that for my website it made absolutely no difference. My average CTR (click-through rate) was about 1.5%. My ads were strategically placed inside the content body and there was no way to avoid them as you scroll down to read.
I removed my Adsense ads two days ago and so far my bounce rate didn’t decrease. In fact, it was unusually high yesterday. Apparently bounce rate is not as straightforward as it seems, and honestly, I am questioning the accuracy of Google Analytics.
About a month or two ago the impression count in my Google Webmaster Tools fell from 10,000+ per day to 3,500 a day and stayed this way until today. There was no change in rankings or in actual traffic numbers. I’ve seen some people report the same but there was no official explanation to this phenomenon.
While I don’t blame Google and am very thankful for all these amazing tools they provide for free, they seem to me not very reliable. This is disturbing because many of us take very important decisions based on this data.
Perhaps if your ads are above the fold and are basically the first thing your visitors see, you will have a higher CTR and a noticeably increased bounce rate, but if your ads are below the fold your CTR will probably stay unaffected.
Does Adsense increase your bounce rate?
Good points. After panda and penguin i don’t really trust their data at all.
This is definitely weird and something that would make me question the accuracy of some of the reporting tools (webmaster, analytics, adsense reports).
I recently had an issue with my adsense account where there was a lag between updating the estimated earnings and the clicks registered. It was showing that I had well over 100 clicks, yet the earnings were little over $6. WTF? This is normally around $30-40 for this type of click activity. So I had to question what was going on there.
Other than that, I can’t say I’ve noticed that adsense has increased my bounce rate (although logically you would assume it would). But this is only because I haven’t done any solid testing. If I were to do an A/B test with adsense and without adsense, then I wouldn’t be surprised if my bounce rate did not decrease or at the very least remain steady with the absence of adsense.
Do you use any other analytics and reporting tools to compare google’s tools to or just google? It would be interesting to note whether there were similar patterns with other reporting tools.
Definitely, there is no way for us to know the truth, but sometimes it’s very obvious, like $6 per 100 clicks. What’s frustrating that you can’t prove anything.
I am using GA and free version of Statcounter and it doesn’t provide bounce rate data.
To be honest, I am training myself to pay less attention to Google. It’s not very easy but I am really tired to worry about them and what’s acceptable and what’s not. I’ve been a very good girl and did everything right and still lost half of my traffic. I know their rules very well. From now on I don’t care. I am not going to build on sand anymore.
So did they pay you only $6 or it got fixed later?
Yeah I hear what you’re sayin.
I can relate both in terms of practicality and sentiment. Personally I think in this day and age it’s just dangerous and reckless to build an online biz that is too reliant on search engines. What really irks me and at the same time creeps me out is google’s reach. You look at all it’s “free” products as well as it’s current push to make G+ even more ubiquitous and it just seems like they’ve got their hand in too many jars. I can’t trust this company. There is no accountability. That is of course unless more webmasters stop pandering to it’s whims, which brings me to my next point…
I would take the point you made above even further and even say that an online biz is on dangerous grounds if more than half of it’s traffic is arriving via search engines. This is a solid mindset and one I’ve been gradually working into my process, and that is if search engines were to disappear overnight, how would my web biz cope? So my aim is to have at least over half of my traffic arriving via sources other than search engines–75% would be gravy!
Yeah the adsense reports eventually we’re corrected. Ended up making around $35 that day. Still it was disconcerting to see that I had like 120 clicks and like $6-7. This is stuff I don’t really care for. I though my account might have been banned as absurd as that might be because my methods are as vanilla as can get. I haven’t even done any serious work in terms of social. It’s actually all the more reason why I’m growing my sites (I run 3 authority type sites) to a point where I scrap adsense in favor of my own advertising program and distribute my own hardgoods personally made and sourced via an online store.
If visitors are bouncing off to other sites via my ad promos or to my online store then I can live with that
Exactly. I am thinking along the same lines. Why waste time building on sand? No reason unless you are actually enjoying the process of sharing your knowledge. Otherwise it’s a waste of precious time.
Could you add some context to what you just said? Mind sharing what’s your bounce rate like?
Hy Dylan and welcome to my blog
It would take some time to get exact numbers, but my bounce rate was about 70 percent and it stayed within its normal range after removing Adsense.