I'm seeing a substantially low "time on site" and high bounce rate from visitors coming from Japan. Comparing to other states, even in languages I don't speak, the stats are still dramatically worse. So I assume there's something specific to that nation, that I should understand in order to make their experience better.

The content they are seeing is in Japanese, and I've also translated the head-lines, which to my surprise didn't make stats look better. The site doesn't have a mobile version, so I assume that might be part of the problem. Wanted to hear from your experience what other reasons might there be that are specific for Japan.

UPDATE: The content itself was in Japanese all the time, that's the reason it attracts users from Japan. The head-lines were in English, so I only changed them.


I work on a site that gets a ton of short-duration, hi-bounce traffic from Iran. It turns out that the acronym for our business is the same as the acronym for a big company in Iran. Iranian visitors see that it is not the site they are looking for and leave.

Have you looked at search words for visitors from Japan? It might be that you rank high in google for a term that is of interest in Japan but that the content you offer is not related to the intended search.


Look at the following

  1. Sources they are coming from and then check how you show up on those sources
  2. Order pages by time on site and bounce rate and check which pages are affected the most
  3. If you are using a translation software, get your content checked manually. There might be some undesired but highly popular typos ranking high in local search engines. So visitors come and not see what the search indicated.
  4. The site getting flagged as malware or spam due to '3'.
  5. You already mentioned the access device as a possible cause.
  6. From point 5, is your site rendering properly in popular browsers Japanese people use.

If you use Google Analytics you can go to the visitor flow section within visitors. The default setting is Country, so you see a nice computation of visitor interest by country. You can get a listing of all target pages there and see the percentage of exits, followed by their first (next) and second and so on interaction (See here at Google Support).

You can also take a look at Content > Target pages, add a secondary dimension of Country and set up an advanced filter for Japane. You can make the result more relevant by setting up a filter rule that only includes pages with 5 (or 10 or 20) pages and a bounce rate of 100% (if you have enough visitors).

There is some advice to set up online visitor surveys on page-exit and really ask people if they found what they searched for (Read Avinash as a starter)

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