Your website gives the impression of a shop where people come looking for the product they desire and need. But when they land on your page, sometimes they get a sense, very quickly, they shouldn’t buy anything here. Even before navigating through your website and looking at products and services offered by you, they might turn away and bounce if they feel that your online store is not for them. Today’s internet users expect to get remarkable experience on your site and want nothing less than the best of everything, let it be food, apparels, apps, or music. When we think about it, there are all kinds of reasons that can prevent your potential customers to stay and spend money on your business.
The higher the percentage of visitors leaving your website without getting engaged with the content, the higher your bounce rate will be. This dreaded term designates whether or not you are holding onto your potential leads and converting them successfully. Having a high bounce rate can severely smash up your reputation, brand value, conversions, sales, and ROI. It extends over the whole spectrum of operational and financial issues which are of a great deal of concern to organizations.
Watch a compiled video of bounce rate factors
What is Bounce Rate?
In analytics terminology, a bounce is defined as a one-hit visit or one-hit session and the term ‘bounce rate’ is the percentage of single-page sessions in which visitors have only one interaction event on a website and then navigate away after seeing that page. It’s calculated by dividing single-page sessions on your site by all sessions recorded. If the visitor doesn’t interact with any content or move to another page, the data will be recorded as a hit.
The benchmark for an excellent bounce rate might differ based on the type of page on your site or the overall website. While about 40 percent is considered an average rate for a landing page, around 60 percent works fine for a home page and services page. The bounce rate categorizing system:
- 5% or lower: The analytics implementation or something is certainly broken
- 26-40%: Excellent
- 41-55%: Good
- 56-70%: Higher than average
- 70% or higher: Bad
Now, let’s have a look at the most common reasons why your website has a high bounce rate along with solutions and steps you can take to improve it.
Problem #1: Slow Page Load Time
No one loves slow, sluggish websites and pages that take a long time to load. While a few seconds is acceptable, anything longer than that might drive your potential users away, unless the visitor has a personal liking for your brand. If your web page doesn’t load nearly instantly and provide a positive, constructive experience, you surely will lose a few potential customers.
A 2-second delay in page load time leads to 22% decrease in customer satisfaction.
Solution
From the SEO perspective, the load time helps Google’s ranking algorithm deciding on the quality, effectiveness, and ranking of your pages and website. That’s why SEO and digital marketing experts should observe and measure the speed and load time of their pages. The longer it takes to load and open a page, the less likely users are to wait and stay on your website, resulting in a single interaction and higher bounce rate. Here are some tips that can help improve your bounce rate:
- Don’t host a website on free or cheap web hosting as they can cause speed, performance, and security issues.
- Don’t include excessive HTTP requests, flash content, third-party scripts, JS effects, and animations and use different custom fonts
- Don’t use oversized and unoptimized images that don’t load and get downloaded quickly
- Don’t overuse images and animations that give your visitors an overcrowded, puzzled look and distract their attention from the main content and offers provided on the website
- Avoid using those designing elements and components that are huge in size and consume a lot of space, causing too many requests
Problem #2: Incorrect Information or False Advertising
Let’s say a marketing executive sets up an advertisement for “All Natural and Healthy Food Products.” But the internet users end up on a page that primarily promotes food products that are produced using synthetically processed and active ingredients derived from natural sources.
Now that’s not what people came looking for, and they would not make a purchase and leave the site immediately.
Solution
Not everyone likes surprises, especially those kinds that end up with bad events and experiences. People generally click on a website link with the hope of finding the right information they need to make a decision. In the above scenario, users would bounce not only because they know the true nature of the ingredients but also the seller has lost their trust by running a misleading ad and giving them incorrect information.
That’s why the business should focus on creating an ad copy and content that is engaging, relevant, and accurate. It should speak to visitors and help them with their unique objectives. Doing so will establish a trust factor between the seller and its visitors and smooth out customer onboarding journey, thereby facilitating the sales and conversions and reducing the bounce rate.
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Problem #3: Pushy and Intrusive Advertisements
I need some information right away so I search online and stumble on a pool of results offering the information. I click on the link that seems the most promising and informative on account of my query. When the site opens, a 30-second video auto-blasts loudly out of nowhere or it asks me to sign up/login to get access to the full content. I get fed up and leave the site as I need that information quickly.
Pushy ads leads to 20% less customer satisfaction
Solution:
When a website bombards its visitors with pop-up subscription forms and surveys and excessive offers, they would have the same experience as described above. Implementing some CTA-heavy features into your website may be beneficial from the marketing and sales perspective but using a large amount of them can scare your potential customers off. Also while displaying ads on your website or the landing page seems a great monetary approach, these ads can acutely compromise the performance and negatively impinge on your visitor’s experience.
But if used just the right type and amount of these marketing and CTA events, they can increase your conversion rate and signups or subscriptions to your lists drastically. To make them work effectively, you need to be careful about choosing ads and offers of sorts and showing them at the right time. Don’t just put your video content on the auto-play mode rather give provide your visitors with a choice whether or not to play it. If your ads are forcefully thrown at them immediately after they alight on your landing page, they might get distracted from the main objective that brought them here, or perhaps might get disabled from your homepage altogether.
Problem #4: Inaccessible and Irrelevant Content: Headings & Subheadings
When the website is stuffed with incorrect, irrelevant, and messy content, visitors won’t invest any time to look through your site and will bounce immediately.
Solution:
Heading and subheadings play to help readers scan selectively and get a logical sense of the concept and idea of the information written. The content your visitors expect to see must show a reasonable relationship between the result shown for their query and heading, subheading, and content on the page. When the content is provided in the right manner and appropriate section, the visitors can quickly inspect and find the information they want. Focus on providing understandable, relevant, and compelling information only. The headings and subheadings should be written in such a way that they can entice visitors and motivate them to spend more time on a website. The more time the visitor spends on your page and find the content or product useful for them, the more likely they are to convert and purchase from you.
One important thing to keep in mind is if your content doesn’t match or is not relevant to words from the search result, it will influence their decision-making ability because they won’t be able to believe anything you have to offer. Such interactions raise a red flag for visitors and lead to a higher bounce rate.
Problem # 5 & 6: Poor landing Page Design & User experience
The landing page is unsystematic and cluttered with unnecessary visuals and design elements, which makes visitors feel overwhelmed and gives a bad user experience.
Solution:
Your landing page is responsible to bring high-quality traffic and leads. That’s the prime reason why people arrive on your website, giving you an opportunity to drive the potential leads through the sales funnel and convert them into customers. When visitors land on a website, they expect the design to be easy to navigate and understand. Anything, from colors and layout to images and animations, which is not pleasant or organized can be a huge turnoff form them. Even a small dose of painful or hideous experience will reflexively trigger their emotions and make them hit the close button.
The design of your website should be adequate and persuasive enough to attract people, encourage them to interact with the content, and provide a better overall user experience. Visitors make their decision of navigating further solely based on what your landing page has to offer. That’s because the design and content of a landing page give them a first-hand impression of what they can expect from a business. It doesn’t matter if other webpages or the entire website is well-designed if the page they land on is not up to the mark they will bounce. Here are some tips for developing killer landing pages to improve user experience and bounce rate:
- Make sure that your website and pages don’t offer an outdated feel and look.
- Include only high-priority, relevant, and discreet content on your landing page.
- Ensure that the content is updated and highlights your unique value proposition and selling points.
- Add captivating, actionable, and clickable CTA buttons and links to the page.
- Keep a simple layout to make the interface user-friendly and use alluring imageries to capture your visitors’ attention.
- Don’t cram your page with unnecessary stuff; use what is utmost needed only.
- Perform A/B testing to get valuable and data-driven analytics on user interactions.
- Make sure that your website and its pages are accessible on all sorts of mobile devices.
- Use appropriate contrast between background and text colors.
Concluding note
There’s no denying that a high bounce is a real deal-breaker for businesses. If your website suffers in any manner, your potential visitors are going to suffer too and so your business and sales. The more people flee away from your website in search of a better solution, the higher your bounce rate will be. By making some essential changes and keeping a watch out for KPI metrics to track the health and performance of your website, you can maintain an average bounce rate and achieve greater digital marketing success.