Understanding Your Website Bounce Rate

Is your website seeing heavy traffic but little conversion to sales? This is not as uncommon as you would think. Many online business owners work so hard at drawing customers to their website yet do nothing about monitoring what the customers are actually doing once they get to the website. You may think 1,000 visitors a day is good, but if only 10 percent of them are converting, is your website really doing its job?

What is a Bounce Rate?

The bounce rate is one of the most vital measurement tools to understand for website owners. In its simplest terms, the bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that come to the landing page and then leave without any interaction to the website. This is important for several reasons.

First, if the page that is generating the most traffic has a high bounce rate, it is a sign that the content on the page is not creating a conversion to a specific goal. The goal for that page may be to get them to sign up for a newsletter, buy a product, or introduce them to another page. Whatever the goal, if the bounce rate is 75 percent, three out of every four visitors are failing to do what you want them to do.

Secondly, you may also have pages with lower bounce rates that are seeing less traffic. Knowing this can help you refocus your marketing efforts to create more conversions. For instance, if your goal is to generate a sale and you are directing readers to two different pages with your online marketing, do you want them to go to the page that is generating a 75 percent bounce rate or a 20 percent bounce rate?

Improving a Bounce Rate

There are numerous ways to reduce your bounce rate. Some are easy fixes and others will take an extensive evaluation of the website. If you are not yet ready to make big changes or want to avoid using a service like Mindsaw for the time being, there are some quick fixes you can look at that may help reduce the bounce rate right away.

• Avoid Pop Ups – pop up program sellers would have you believe that pop up marketing is the best way to land a customer right out of the gate. Unfortunately, this is far from true. In most cases, readers get annoyed by excessive pop ups and lose their focus on why they actually went to the website. Eliminate them from your website if at all possible.
• Obvious Marketing – using catchy or trending terms may seem like a great idea to draw customers in, but if these terms are unrelated to your website, the only thing these hits will do is increase your bounce rate, not reduce it. This may be one of the main reasons you have high traffic and low conversions. Your marketing needs to grab the attention of website visitors that will convert to sales, not draw them in under false pretense.
• Difficult Navigation – this is yet another reason why many visitors will leave a website even if they had every intention of making a purchase. For instance, can they get back to the main storefront after adding something to their cart? Is this navigation obvious from looking at the website? Do you have an internal site search? Or, are you asking them to jump through hoops to get from one page to the next?

As the website owner, it may be difficult to look at the site and honestly evaluate it for SEO problems, especially if you designed the site. However, the Mindsaw team would be more than happy to help you with these problems by evaluating the site and offering our opinion as to how we can make your website better and turn it into the ecommerce machine you had hoped it would be when you first launched it.

If you would like to contact the Mindsaw Team for more information, you can call us at 800-958-9048 or use our online contact form and click here.

*Photo Courtesy of DualFlipFlop via Creative Commons License