If you own an e-commerce business, you must want people visiting your website constantly but you also want them sticking along for a good period of time. Because what if those visitors leave your website after having viewed only a single page without interacting further with your site? Not good, right?
That is what is called a BOUNCE RATE!
The percentage of those users bouncing off your website without roaming through other pages is referred to as bounce rate. It differs from site to site but bounce rates in general tend to range from 55 to 70 percent and above. Which could only mean one thing… that is, the site is most likely not appealing enough for those consumers to actually go digging deeper into its pages. A problem or a few must be the issue.
Here are a few common ones:
- Failure to comprehend navigation options
- Unengaging content (whether images, texts or videos)
- Slow loading website
- A poorly designed website (unappealing designs disinterest visitors)
- The existence of an annoying number of ads
- No call to action involved
The most successful ecommerce brands set up their business-decisions off of data. One of the critical metrics that your business should always be concentrated on is your website’s bounce rate.
So how do you calculate your website’s bounce rate?
Easy! First of all, a high bounce rate is mostly regarded as a bad indicator and a low rate one is a good sign.
All you have to do is log into your Google Analytics and there it would be, waiting for you.
It is on a default setting that a user, when visiting at least one additional page, is dealt with as having interacted with your website. What you see in your overview report on Google Analytics is your site-wide bounce rate.
To calculate it manually, say for instance, that 1000 people landed on your website, 500 of whom exited it without wandering to any other pages, the bounce rate would be:
(500 / 1000) * 100 = 50%
Does Bounce Rate Really Matter for E-commerce Businesses?
One word, YES! If you were running websites such as Wikipedia, bounce rate should be the least of your concerns since people usually land on such websites to read about a certain thing (having searched about it from a search engine). And more often than not, a single page could provide enough information on what the person was investigating. Meaning, they wouldn’t need to navigate further. But when it is an e-commerce business we are talking about, it is totally a different case.
In one good scenario, you would expect a visitor to interact with your e-commerce platform because that is the reason why it is built. You would want them to purchase the item they came in search for by clicking on the buy button then proceeding with the transaction. In another great scenario, you would want them to wander through other pages in your website in hope they would find more items and products to add to their cart and later purchase. But that would be unlikely to happen unless your website’s bounce rate is low!
That is exactly why maintaining a high bounce rate for your e-commerce business is of paramount importance.
What is a good bounce rate?
It might be somewhat alarming if your bounce rate is higher than anticipated. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- A bounce rate of 0% indicates that every single visitor visits additional pages before leaving your website.
- A bounce rate of 50% indicates that 1 in 2 leaves your website without visiting additional pages.
- A bounce rate of 100% indicates that each person who visits your website leaves before visiting another page.
Quite subjective a good bounce rate is. If you are website has lot of traffic and a 60% bounce rate, then reducing it to 55% could be a pretty massive increase in revenue.
Bounce off less, sell more!
Irrespective of what type of e-ecommerce business you are running, your main target should be to decrease your bounce rate. The matter which also means, you need to provide better everything to your audience in order to meet their needs.
Here are 4 effective ways to reduce your website’s bounce rate:
Enhance your website’s loading speed
Almost fifty percent of users expect a site to load in two seconds or less. Therefore, make sure to improve your site’s load speed. But worry not, you can improve it without hiring any of the professional web developers which will charge a bunch. Check this out for ways to speed your website.
Provide engaging content, act smart!
Be your own guest and embed polls, contests, and other attention-grabbing clickable content. However, if the sole purpose of these tactics is just to decrease your bounce rate, you may lose sight of what a real consumer is looking for.
It is essential to leave a good first impression, a site’s mission to either sell, entertain or inform should always be prioritized.
- Improve your site visually
- Provide quality content
- Provide related content
- Provide a distinct call to action
Take advantage of social media
Everyone uses social media these days so know that the more discovered you are through social networks, the greater the effect of these platforms on your bounce rates. Create your account on as many social media as possible and links to your website. Use relevant hashtags to qualify your content, along with other metadata, like location, that can add more information.
Include navigation options
If your site constitutes confusion, or if a user is unsure where he or she should go after landing on your site, expect a bounce as a result. Make each piece of information easy to find by adding navigation options.
Conclusion
It may seem that bounce rate depends on your visitors only but know that it depends on you too! As if you provide quality content along with the above-mentioned strategies then I am confident you will rank up in search engines.