Bounce Rates: How They Affect Your Conversion Rates; and How to Fix Them

When looking over your analytics data about the visitors who came to your site, you’re likely to see something called “Bounce Rate”. This is the number of visitors who came to your site, decided for whatever reason that it wasn’t for them, and “bounced” right out the digital door.

Can this number be lowered? Absolutely. While you can’t be everything to everyone, there are still some steps you can take to get that bounce rate lowered and improve every visitor’s browsing experience on your site – starting today. Here’s how to do it:

Look At Your Referrers

If there’s a disconnect between where people are coming from when they land on your site, it’s an obvious precursor to high bounce rates. To see this, check your referrer logs from your website analytics. Many people use Google Analytics for this and you can optionally request a report daily, weekly or monthly to see where your traffic is coming from before it gets to you.

As an example, if someone links to your page selling red widgets, but you’re out of stock, those visitors looking for red widgets will see that and go elsewhere. Instead, you can leverage this “out of stock” page to mention when you’ll be having more red widgets in stock, or recommend blue widgets instead.

Check Your Site’s Usability

Sometimes people leave not because you don’t have what they’re looking for, but because your site is too cumbersome to use, or takes too long to load. This is particularly true for users on mobile devices. If your site isn’t mobile responsive, they simply won’t take the time to wait for it to load and then slog through trying to navigate it.

There are a variety of both free and paid usability tools including sites like usertesting.com, trymyui.com and many others which will let users review and use your site just as if they were right there with you. These sites also allow them to talk about issues they encounter as they’re browsing the site, so you can see precisely what areas need work.

Create Landing Pages

One of the best ways to decrease your bounce rate is to create landing pages around your most popular products or services. These individual pages typically have an offer of some kind (a coupon code, a free guide, etc.) that prospects can get in exchange for their email address. Going back to our widget example, rather than having visitors land on your widget catalog page (and thus creating confusion about what color/size/shape, etc.) you can direct them precisely to the red widget page detailing all the benefits on your product while giving them a 10% discount code in exchange for their email address.

Decreasing bounce rates takes more than just a few tweaks to your pages, but these will give you a reliable starting point to making sure that visitors who come to your pages love what they see – good luck!

________________________ Endertech is a Los Angeles Tech Company offering Digital Marketing and SEOexpertise in addition to our web development services. Contact us for your free consultation.