The bounce rate is the percentage of users who hit a page on your site and the browse away to another site without doing anything. A high bounce rate should be a concern for any online business because it means that no matter how much of your marketing budget you spend on driving new customers to your site a large percentage of them are leaving before they have engaged with your site driving up Acquisition Costs and damaging your bottom line.
In most cases high bounce rates are caused by poorly designed websites that don’t make the choices available to the users obvious and relevant. But with some simple and easy-to-implement strategies you should be able to improve your bounce rate and start turning your website visitors into customers.
Skip intro – fortunately not as prevalent as it once was but there are some sites that persist with the fancy Flash animated intro that you have to sit through before you get to the meat of the site. If your site has one kill it now and watch your bounce rate improve overnight – we promise.
Load times – people have a very short attention span online – if your site is taking longer than 5 seconds to load you are going to lose a lot of impatient punters to your competitors. Make sure your code and images are correctly optimised and that you are using a decent hosting provider that performs well in your local market.
Make a good impression – if your site looks unprofessional or badly put together it is probably time to consider a redesign or risk alienating your potential new customers. Compare your site to other’s in the your market or if you find it difficult to be objective ask your friends or trusted customers to give you feedback to ensure your site is up to scratch.
Keep it quiet – again not as much of a blight on the online world as it once was but embedded audio is a guaranteed website killer. Large numbers of your users will simply hit the close button if a website starts making a noise unprompted. If you insist on having audio or it is particularly relevant for your busines always make sure it only plays if the user requests it.
Browser compatibility – does your website work in all the popular website browsers and on a Mac as well as a PC. Different combinations of platforms and browsers can lead to wildly different renderings of your website and extreme cases it may just look broken. Test extensively and if you are working with an agency ask them about their QA process and what browsers they develop for.
What’s it all about Alfie – pages on your website should make it obvious to any visitors what the site is about, why it is of interest to the visitor and what you expect them to do. Good use of images and strong copywriting will help here along with a well designed site with clear concise navigation.
Less is more – keep the number of options available to website visitors on any given page to a minimum. People scan rather than read websites so dense paragraphs of copy or long lists of links are likely to overwhelm people and lead them elsewhere. Simplify the choices you present visitors but make them relevant and compelling to drive people deeper into your website.
Focus on relevance – if you find you are getting a lot of visits to your site for particular search terms that have little or no relevance to your offering then your bounce rate is going to appear artificially large. You might want to discount these people from your bounce rate metrics or consider refining your search marketing efforts to drive more relevant traffic to your site.
