Reducing webpage bounce rate

Reducing the bounce rate

Bounce rate is regarded as an extremely effective and simple metric. The higher the bounce rate the less effective the digital customer experience. Knowing your bounce rate can also help determine the quality of your traffic. High bounce rate coupled with large volumes of single source traffic could indicate poor referrals.

Webpage Bounce Rate

Knowing that your website’s experience is not effectively optimized is only half the answer. What we really need to know is why the bounce is occurring in order to take the right corrective actions.

Are you getting the right traffic? The first step in the detective process is to figure out if your visitors are intentional or unintentional. Unintentional visitors are those visitors with no interest in your offerings. They usually view only a single page of your website and spend less than 4 seconds engaging. They usually leave your page without even looking at it and in all likelihood, shouldn’t have landed on your page in the first place.

Intentional visitors are those visitors who have an interest in your product offerings. If they viewed a single page and had an engagement time of between 4-10 seconds, they may have the potential to come back at a later time with the right messaging or follow-up. Intentional visitors have lots of interest in your offerings and will usually have an engagement time of over 10 seconds. Because they are considered in the bounce rate, these visitors still click away from your page. They probably didn’t find what they were looking for. Or they were nervous about making a commitment to ‘buy’ or provide their details to the online form.

Things to consider:

1.      Does your page load fast enough?
Before you look to optimize the content on the page make sure the page is technically sound and loads in a reasonable time.

2.      Does your content meet visitor expectations?
Intentional visitors are interested in your services and the content your website has to offer. But they’re leaving because there’s something missing from your page.  ClickTale has a cool feature where you can view your web pages with heatmaps. You can see if visitors are being distracted by other elements on the page and never get to the call to action part. This can be anything from an unnecessary link to an interactive visual that you never assumed would hurt your conversion.

3.     Do your calls to action perform?
Check your calls to action. Do they stand out enough on the page? Or are they blending in with additional page elements? Sometimes the most important calls to action fall below the fold line so most visitors are not even aware they exist.

Bounced visitors don’t have to be lost customers. A few tweaks to your landing page can save your company thousands in revenue especially if the fix is something that can be achieved relatively quickly and economically.

Steve Steinberger

www.klicktwice.com

561-281-8330