Traffic Down 50%. Bounce Rate Down 40% Too?

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I was looking at my Google Adsense pondering the thought of what I could do to increase my earnings. The very first website I created here at Wealthy Affiliate was making about $20 every month from Adsense. I decided to look at what kind of traffic data supported those earnings.

When I opened Google Analytics, the results were shocking. Despite haven't written anything in nearly a year and only having 50 out of 100 or so posts that were SEO-optimized, I was getting around 200-400 visitors every day.

But something didn't feel right. For some reason, despite having nearly ten thousand visitors every month, it only equated to $20. Did my traffic consist of mostly bots?

A 90% Bounce Rate

When I looked at my bounce rate, that's when I realized where things are going wrong. I had a bounce rate of about 87% for most of March.


Since bounce rate is calculated by the number of people who didn't interact with your page divided by the number of people who came to your site, an 87% bounce rate meant that 87% of my traffic didn't do anything on my website.

If I had 300 visitors in one day with an 87% bounce rate, that meant only 39 people actually spent time on my website. Suddenly my earnings seem much more justified. There's hardly anybody actually looking at my website.

I knew about this problem before. In the past, I tried to redesign my website to fix some of the problems related to speed and engagement. I have an article here on WA talking about that redesign.

Although I never fully completed the plan I created, I did do a little bit of work that made my website faster, more readable, and aesthetically cleaner.

Unfortunately, my bounce rate problem never went away. I was still in that 80-90% range.

Eventually, I gave up after reading that a 60-90% bounce rate on blogs was completely normal. Bounce rate did not exactly equate to people who come to your site and immediately leave. Sometimes they could read through your entire article, do nothing else, and then go back to the search results and Google Analytics may count the user as a bounced user.

AMP, Improving Mobile Performance?

For the longest time, Google Adsense kept recommending me to add AMP to my WordPress blog to improve my earnings and performance. I took a glimpse at what AMP entailed and didn't care much for it because it looked too complicated at the time.

A couple of days ago, I got an email in my inbox from Neil Patel, talking about how AMP was improving his website's performance. Excited by the opportunity to improve my website, I added AMP to my website.

The results were... stunning?

I'm neither happy nor angry about the results. Within four days of installing AMP, both my traffic and bounce rate dropped significantly. My earnings also slightly went down while my mobile page loading speed scores improved drastically.


If my main focus was on affiliate marketing or driving traffic to my own shop, then these stats are very good news. An improved mobile page loading speed and lower bounce rate metrics will lead to more traffic in the future with more posts.

And that's what I plan to do. In the short term, I am suffering a little bit, but over the long run, I believe AMP will do a lot more good than harm to my website.

I'm also ready to learn more about AMP, test different strategies, and try to create a strategy that really works well for me.

How To Add AMP To Your Blog

If you would like to try out AMP yourself, I created a tutorial for that purpose. You can click the links below to learn Google's official WordPress AMP installation tutorial completely for free.

How To Add AMP To Your WordPress Website And Improve Mobile User Experience

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/how-to-add-amp-to-y...

Check out the training and let me know what you think. I appreciate any feedback!

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Recent Comments

11

Excellent post, Kevin.
I just wondered, is this a site hosted at WA or somewhere else?
:-)
Richard

Hi Richard. This site is hosted at WA.

Hi Kevin
I am sure I have read somewhere in the WA World that AMP is not needed if we host at WA. However I have just found this: :-)
Richard

AMP is completely optional. I do notice drastic improvements in mobile speeds when using AMP, so I will be sticking with it longer. Thanks for linking the training.

Thank you, Kevin for sharing your experience.
:-)
Richard

No problem :)

Really thoughtful blog with great insights
Thank you Kevin for sharing

Thanks for the comment!

Interesting, Kevin! I hope that it works out for you!

Jeff

Yep. Thanks for commenting!

You're welcome, Kevin!

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