google analytics

Guidelines to Avoiding Google’s Penalty Caused by Intrusive Interstitials

Posted on by Mario

Intrusive interstitials guidelines to avoiding google's penalty

This year, Google has made one recent change known as the intrusive interstitial update. This update aims to penalize intrusive popup ads which affect the mobile user experience. No wonder that some websites have experienced lowered mobile rankings. If you are working in SEO service field, this thing may become one of your concerns. But, don’t worry as you can avoid Google’s penalty caused by intrusive interstitials. Figure out the solutions in the passages below.

Decrypting the Intrusive Interstitial Update
First of all, it’s a mobile popup penalty.  Secondly, it’s an intrusive popup penalty. In light of this, Google wants to make sure that ads and popups do not interfere with the user experience. By devaluing pages with popups and overlays on the screen, Google can help users access the content they’ve requested in the first place.

What is the Impact of this Latest Update?
Pages with intrusive interstitials will no longer consider as being mobile-friendly. This is because obstructing content on mobile with ads or other popups is against Google’s guidelines. Ads or popups on screen causes the content inaccessible for a few seconds. In fact, Ads displayed over content are no longer acceptable on mobile. This includes popups that appear when you load the page from Google or when you scroll down.

What Constitutes an Intrusive Interstitial?
Intrusive interstitials will lead to a frustrating experience for desktop and mobile users alike. In fact, it tends to block most or all of a page. This will hinder visitors from experiencing your site as they block the content that visitors seek unexpectedly. In light of this, intrusive interstitials has become the biggest enemy as on desktop they are annoying at best and can ruin the entire experience on mobile.

What is still Permitted and not?
Even though, you have to deal with pop ups ads, but this doesn’t mean that all pop ups are forbidden. In fact, some popups are still permitted, such as:

  • Intrusive popups are still ok on desktop
  • Interstitials triggered by exit intent are still allowed
  • Page to page interstitials will not be penalized

Types of intrusive interstitials that will be forbidden are:

  • a popup or modal window that blocks most or all of the content on a page (this is basically a full-screen interstitial above the header);
  • a standalone interstitial that’s not responsive and that blocks the content;
  • a layout in which the content above the fold has the look and feel of an interstitial and requires dismissal or scrolling in order for the user to reach the main content beneath the fold.

Workarounds
Popups is frustrating indeed, but companies use them as at some points they are effective. So, if interstitials still become the best options to convert users for your websites. You can consider keeping them on the website by a no-index tag in your code. However, this will cut off organic traffic from Google to that page.

Therefore, designers, developers and marketers must create another ways to generate revenue. A sound strategy would be to leverage content marketing to educate audiences and guide them through the buying process. In the other words, you should move away from interruption marketing towards permission marketing.

So, the solutions that you can do related to this situation are; audit your popups, cookie notifications, overlays and big banners. This is to make sure that they comply with Google’s new guidelines. Furthermore, make sure that don’t take up space more than 15% from the screen to avoid penalty.

Understanding bounce rate in Google Analytics

Posted on by Mario

Understanding Bounce Rate in Google Analytics

What’s Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is a metric that shows you how many visitors that do completely nothing on the page they entered. This means they don’t give any response to your internal links on the page. Internal link means a menu item, a ‘read more’ link, or any other internal links on the page. In the other words, Google analytics server doesn’t get any trigger from the visitor.

This will cause Google to think these three things:

  1. The quality of the page is low. There’s nothing inviting to engage with.
  2. Your audience doesn’t match the purpose of the page, as they won’t engage with your page.
  3. Visitors have found the information that they were looking for.

In SEO perspective, it is important to optimize every aspect of your site. By looking closely at your bounce rate, you can optimize your website even further. No wonder many SEO services attempt to keep their client’s page free from any bounce rate.

But bounce rate doesn’t mean bad all the time. In fact, it is okay to have bounce rates in some cases. As bounce rate really depends on the purpose of the page. Bounce rate isn’t a bad thing per se if the purpose of the page is to purely inform. For example, read a post or find an address.

So, the best solution is by creating a segment that contains “New visitors” only. If you discover that bounce rate of your new visitors is high, it’s time reevaluate user engagement with your site. To reduce the bounce rate, you can add a clear call-to-action, a ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ button. Moreover, being clear from the start with what visitors could expect will also give good point to your bounce rate. There more things that you also need to consider when optimizing your page. For instance, internal links that point to related pages or posts. Having a menu that is easy to use will also prevent your site experience a high bounce rate.

From a conversion perspective, bounce rate can be used as a metric to measure success. Bear in mind changing the design of your page will shake your bounce rate. It will cause the bounce rate increase or oppositely decrease in bounces. This explains why you have low conversion rate.

Or you can also compare your site with other popular pages and learn from the pages with low bounces rates. Usually, an unnaturally low bounce rate is caused by an event that triggers the Google Analytics server. Think of pop-ups, auto-play of videos or an event you’ve implemented that fires after 1 second. Besides, you can also use a tool that can track scrolling counts. This count is helpful as you can know whether your visitors actually scroll down the page and read your content.

This makes bounce rate is different from exit rate. In general, exit rate is a metric that displays percentage of page views that were last in the session. So, it is about users deciding to end their session on your website on that particular page.