Bounce Rate and AdSense

Do AdSense ads increase bounce rate? Analytics: No.

[wredlich]

Do AdSense ads increase bounce rate? I checked my Analytics on this and found the answer is no. I'm interested to hear what others think.

Researching link building, I read an interesting discussion on a different forum that struck me. The forum post was here: [webmasterworld.com...]

The general theme is that you shouldn't have ads on your site if you want links. Webmasters will not want to link to you because your site will look spammy. One reply specifically said that having AdSense on your site will increase your bounce rate.

Aha! I happen to have a website where I can check a theory like that. I have my ads set up by state, and two of my busiest states have little or no AdSense ads on them. The other states tend to be loaded with ads - top, left and bottom.

The short answer is that I didn't see a substantial difference in bounce rates. If anything, the numbers suggest AdSense lowers the bounce rate. But I don't see why that would be, so I'll go with the view that there's little or no impact.

[edited by: bill at 1:57 am (utc) on Dec. 3, 2009]
[edit reason] No personal links as per TOS [/edit]

[StoutFiles]

Did you check your Google Analytics? I've found that Google's results tend to differ a good amount from server logs. More of an estimate than fact when it comes to some of their data.

[wredlich]

Yes, I used Google Analytics. GA may not be perfect, but I don't see why it would matter on this issue.

[alika]

In my experience, the sites with higher Adsense income have significantly higher bounce rates compared to sites that does not work well with Adsense.

Instead of looking at traffic as the main variable, consider the Adsense income.

[wredlich]

We changed the way our site does AdSense about a year ago. For most pages on the site, we went from one ad unit at the top to three ad units (top, left, and bottom). We also added channels - a different channel for each state. Our AdSense income increased dramatically (quintupled). Our bounce rate does seem to have gone up ever so slightly (from 62-64% to now 65-66%). But there have been other changes to the site so I'm not sure if the AdSense even caused that minimal increase.

[edited by: engine at 10:22 am (utc) on Dec. 12, 2009]
[edit reason] No urls, see WebmasterWorld TOS [/edit]

[Receptional]

Surely, if adsense does not increase bounce rate, then you can't make money out of Adsense?

[ken_b]

Surely, if adsense does not increase bounce rate, then you can't make money out of Adsense?

Why not?

Every visitor is eventually going to leave your site at some point. The presence ads doesn't necessarily mean they will leave any sooner, let alone bounce. The ads just give them another path to leave by.

[digitalv]

The notion that AdSense increases the bounce rate is a fallacy.

Think about it ... on average, only 1-2% of visitors click on ads. Therefore, even if 100% of the people who are likely to click an ad do it your bounce rate would only increase by that same 1-2%.

[lammert]

The notion that AdSense increases the bounce rate is a fallacy.

It is not AdSense itself which creates a higher bounce rate, but the extra JavaScript downloading and execution time may cause some users to hit the back button before the page has been fully loaded, simply because they don't want to wait until the page has been rendered completely. Some browsers have significant problems by design to download Javascript files simultaneously and all browsers are limited to one JavaScript script executing at the time due to their single threaded architecture and concurrency rules.

Especially with visitors on slower lines and sites with more than one AdSense unit or with heavy use of display/video AdSense units the bounce rate may increase is my experience.

[jkovar]

I completely removed Adsense from a blog with a 90% bounce rate for one month, doing so didn't change the bounce rate at all.