Getting informed about Bounce Rates.
Even if you rarely venture into the analytics of your business you will be aware of Bounce Rates. These seemingly harmless percentages can give you extraordinary insights into how your customers view your website.
What is a Bounce Rate?
Bounce rates show how long a visitor has stayed on your site, how deep they’ve ventured into your site and, depending on your analytics if their visit resulted in a conversion.
Ideally, you need your bounce rates to be low as this shows you, and Google, that your website is engaging and performing as it should.
#Top Tip – Although tempting, buying cheap traffic for your website will increase your bounce rates. This will also have a knock on effect as it will suggest that you are a low quality website. Bought traffic doesn’t work, it actually damages businesses, and you need real people, real leads and more than one click on the homepage. If you do want to use money to drive people to your site, consider AdWords instead. Our PPC services can help with this.
If you’ve recently discovered that your bounce rate is high, there are ways to improve it instantly. In the long term of course you do need great web design, sound copywriting services and good digital marketing to keep those bounce rates as low as possible.
Here some tips to lower your bounce rate today.
Your homepage.
Look deeper into your analytics. Are people landing on your homepage and bouncing off or are they digging a bit deeper before they turn tail and run? If it’s the former, you can make instant changes right now.
The average visitor gives you 5 seconds to make an impression. If your homepage doesn’t capture their attention in this time, they’ll simply go elsewhere.
Homepages that usually turn visitors off have:
- Poor Design (we’ll discuss this in another post)
- No obvious direction – Is it immediately obvious where you want your customers to go next? Do they have too much choice or do they have to find out for themselves? If you want them to shop, show them products with a link to browse.
- Too Much Text – Once a customer has decided to stay, they will want to read more. Copy sells, it’s a fact. However, they won’t want to take in too much on your homepage. Leave them the option to read more on another page so they don’t feel as if they’re missing something crucial should they decide to hop straight into your shop.
- Slow Loading Content – Videos are wonderful for promoting products but they can slow a website down. They can also put off the shopper that’s sneakily browsing your products at work, especially if they run automatically. Consider sharing the videos on social networks instead.
- Overly Formal Copy – Unless you’re selling PhD textbooks, pretentious language should be overlooked. No shopper enjoys feeling uneducated when they come across words they need a dictionary for. Your shop should be your welcome, your greeting to the customer that’s just stepped in the door. If you wouldn’t use the words in a normal conversation, leave the thesaurus alone and keep them off your website.
Your checkout.
This is a whole new article as basket abandonment is a big problem while the solutions are pretty simple.
In summary though, keep the checkout process as easy as possible, have an address generator, let people checkout as guests and don’t put them through an obstacle course of advertising when they’re ready to part with their credit card details.
Everything in between.
Of course this isn’t all. There are many other factors that put visitors off such as the products you link, the way a shopping cart is accessed, the notifications and design. This will, however, give you a great starting point.