Last editedMar 20212 min read
If you run an e-commerce site, every visitor to your website is a sale waiting to happen. Even if you don’t sell your products or services through your website, each visitor represents the start of a mutually beneficial relationship in the making. However, you may find there’s a significant gulf between your reach (how many visitors arrive at your website) and your sales or conversions.
If you feel that there’s too much of a disparity between your hit rate and your reach, now’s the perfect time to look into your website’s bounce rate. Bounce rate is an extremely important metric for businesses, but it’s also one of the most misunderstood. Here we’ll look at five easy ways to reduce your bounce rate.
What is the bounce rate?
Some visitors will navigate away from your website without buying a product or converting in another way such as downloading your lead magnet or signing up to your email newsletter. If they land on a web page and leave, this is known as “bouncing”. Your bounce rate is the number of visitors to your website who land on a page then leave. This is not to be confused with your exit rate – the number of visitors who navigate around your website for a little while, then leave.
What is the average bounce rate?
The average bounce rate is between 41% and 51%. If yours is higher, you should make addressing it a priority. There are some ways in which you can reduce bounce, drive sales and increase conversions.
1. Improve your page load speeds
We live in an era where most people who access the internet do so in short bursts, using a mobile device and often while on the go. The upshot is that patience is not a virtue that you can expect from them. In fact, a page load time of just five seconds can increase your bounce rate by as much as 38%.
Enabling compression, minimising scripts, and optimising your images so they’re not too large and unwieldy are all great ways to improve page load speeds.
2. Cross-reference with time-on-page / site
It’s important to remember that metrics (including bounce rate) can only tell you so much in isolation. Looking at bounce rate in relation to time-on-page can yield more useful insights than looking at bounce rate on its own. If your time-on-page figures are good but your bounce rates are high, the issue may be with your content.
3. Format your content to be more accessible
Patience and attention are rare commodities in the digital realm, especially in the mobile age. Formatting your content to make it easier and more digestible to the eye (especially on a mobile device) can reduce your bounce rates and keep visitors on the page for longer.
User experience (UX) is an important consideration for your page design. The harder it is for visitors to access the information they’re looking for, the more likely they are to bounce.
4. Keep your content relevant
No visitor wants to be greeted by a wall of text when they land on your page. But at the same time, you need to ensure that your content is relevant to their needs. Even if your content is impeccably presented, visitors will bounce away if they don’t consider it relevant.
Relevance is the sweet spot between what you want to say (and can say with authority) and what the visitor wants to read.
5. Tweak your product pages
Finally, if some products are selling better than others, the issue may not be with the products themselves so much as the product pages. If your pages are loaded with too much information, you may scare potential customers away. But display too little, and they may not have enough information to commit to a sale.
Could your product pages be missing an important piece of information? Or is the information they’re after buried under an avalanche of other stuff? A/B testing different iterations of product pages can help you to identify and fix issues with them.
We can help
If you’re interested in finding out more about your bounce rates, conversion rates, or any other aspect of your business finances, then get in touch with our financial expert. Find out how GoCardless can help you with ad hoc payments or recurring payments.
