Reasons Why Your Blog Has High Bounce Rate

Your blog has high bounce rate is very high, which is a very common thing.  High bounce rate is an indication that your site is not providing the value visitors were expected, resulting in single access to a page and leaving the site.

Web analyst would always say to lower the bounce rate, and some would say to reduce it less than 50%.

When you look at your Google Analytics and review your blog section, it tends to have a higher bounce rate than site section.

In this example website, I noticed that bounce rate was much higher than the other site section.

Insights
I’ve segmented the blog section and the non-blog section by new visitors and returning visitors.

I came to notice that types of visitors were pretty much equally split (50-50) in terms of new and returning visitors to both sections.

Looking at the bounce rate broken down by new and returning visitors to those two sections.

– The bounce rate for the new visitors in blog section was 120% higher than the returning visitors in the blog section.

– The bounce rate for the new visitors in the static section was 40% higher than the returning visitors in the non-blog section.

The bounce rate for new visitors would most likely be higher than the returning visitors.

The learning is that the new visitors for blog section/site, the bounce rate tends to be higher.

Now, you can do this segmentation analysis using many different dimensions like traffic source, device type (mobile, desktop, or tablet).  As mobile traffic grows, a lot of the blog readers from mobile devices are also showing more signs of high bounce rate.

People seem to just land, read through the content, get what they need, and then leave.

Possible Reasons
1) Users reading the blog tends to read and leave as they just want their questions in that moment answered. and probably come back to read again on other time. Good metrics to use to analyze this are the recency and loyalty metrics.

2) Returning visitors are probably come back to read again on other time, with the expectation to gain new valuable content on the subsequent visits. Good metrics to use to analyze this are the recency and loyalty metrics.

3) Visitor sources for these two sections may vary and stickiness for the source trending differently.  Perhaps the referral from another blog could have a possible intent that is very different from people who came from Google Search.

4) The expectation of visitors when entering the blog section Vs non-blog section may vary. Especially, if the path to an outcome is designed differently, or the CTA (call-to-action) aren’t addressing your site visitors well enough to allow them to move to the next page.
I hope this would help you in finding the next step in the analysis of the bounces. Don’t give up in lowering that bounces!