When the bounce rate increases, it means that people are quickly leaving your site without engaging with anything on it. This isn’t just frustrating—it also means that you’re missing out on sales from people who may have been interested in what you have to offer but couldn’t find what they were looking for on your site. And it will impact your bottom line for sure.
What Can Be Defined as Bounce Rate for an Ecommerce Site?
Bounce rate refers to a web analytics metric used to quantify the percentage of visitors who visit a single page on a website and then leave without further interaction. The general bounce rate is between 20% and 45%, with a bounce rate lower than 20% is considered extraordinary.
In the case of an online store, bounce rate happens when visitors:
- Land on your store homepage and left without taking further action.
- Leave your product page as soon as they land on it.
- Check out information on your contact information page and abandon the website.
How to Optimize Your Ecommerce Site for Bounce Rate?
Check your homepage and landing pages:
If a customer lands on your homepage and bounces immediately, they may not have found what they were looking for. It could be due to a poor sales pitch or lack of information on that page.
While you shouldn’t spend time worrying about your bounce rate as an isolated metric, you should keep an eye out for large increases or decreases in it as part of your larger set of website analytics.
Optimize the Site for Return Customers:
An important way to increase your bounce rate is making sure you are optimizing for returning visitors and not just new ones. Many people who come to your site for the first time don’t immediately buy from you or sign up for an account. That doesn’t mean they won’t ever buy from you or that they aren’t valuable leads. Optimizing for returning visitors and those who are already familiar with your brand will help ensure that even if a customer doesn’t buy from you during their first visit, they will still visit again later.
Use Clear calls-to-action:
Users who visit an eCommerce site should be able to easily find what they’re looking for—that means having a clear call to action. Too often, sites will list products but not include add-to-cart buttons or shopping carts; they may include shop now buttons or shopping carts, but these are often hard to find. If you want to minimize bounce rate on your eCommerce site, make sure users can easily see and use these features. This might mean putting them in a prominent place on every page of your site so visitors know how to purchase items, such as with Amazon and Walmart. Or it might mean creating calls-to-action that pop out at visitors when they first arrive at your site so that they know how to look around and buy (such as with Best Buy). There are many other ways you can do it – just make sure it’s easy!
Use Video (With Links!:
According to a recent survey, 56% of consumers watch video content and 50% read blogs. Videos can be an effective way to answer questions your audience might have about a product or service. When writing a post that includes a video, it’s best practice to give people quick links so they can view it quickly and easily. This is especially important if you’re trying to drive traffic back to your e-commerce site because you want them watching and buying—not jumping off your page.
Communicate credibility with trust badges, reviews, testimonials, etc.:
The point is here to give customers a reason to trust you. Trust badges, reviews, testimonials are great ways to do just that. You can also get creative and display customer service policies, shipping times, FAQs, and more.
If your site looks like it was designed by someone who really knows what they’re doing and has been in business for a while, chances are you’ll have a lower bounce rate than someone who doesn’t display any of these things because customers feel safer trusting people that have proven themselves. It takes time but if you are dedicated you will succeed!
Improve mobile experience:
Mobile devices account for nearly 50% of all web traffic and almost 75% of all e-commerce orders. At some point in time, it was just a matter of time before mobile sales converted at a higher rate than desktop sales.
If you have an e-commerce site, now is that time. And if you don’t have one yet, what are you waiting for? Mobile commerce may still be a niche business but its market share is growing rapidly. Make sure your e-commerce site has at least been optimized for mobile users so they don’t go somewhere else instead.
Don’t worry; improving your site for mobile is not as scary as it sounds! These days, there are plenty of tools that can help.
Optimize your site’s speed:
No matter how user-friendly your online shop is, sluggish speed is enough to turn off the visitor.
It is quite frustrating to wait for a page to load. Studies have shown that shopping cart abandonment rates increase by as much as 40% for sites that take more than four seconds to load!
Take Note of the Size of Search Bar:
Sometimes visitors are not able to find the thing even it is present on the page, leading to a high bounce rate.
To deal with this problem, you have to make your search bar look as prominent as possible. It should be at least 18-characters-wide. Though short search boxes can accommodate long queries, the issue is that only a part of that query will be visible at a time, thereby making editing or reviewing the query difficult.
If you cannot give bigger space to your search bar, you can at least make it automatically become larger as one starts typing into it.
Fix Usability Issues:
Much like small search bar issues, usability issues can be the culprit behind the increased bounce rate of your eCommerce site. If people cannot move further on a site that fails to work, the bounce is almost unavoidable. In other words, usability issues can ruin user experience which in turn leads to a higher bounce rate.
Some common usability concerns to address are…
- Websites that respond well on mobile devices
- 404 errors
- Technical problems such as faulty menus or broken links.
You need to perform usability testing to identify such technical errors on your online store website, and one of the easiest kinds of usability testing is watching session recording; reviewing your high bounce pages, addressing any issues—and then resolving them to enhance the user experience on your website.
Hope that these tips would help you fix the bounce rate on your eCommerce website. What do you think? Do you have other ideas to reduce the bounce rate? Or do you have a query? Or do you just want to simply thank me for this info (lol…wink)? Do it all by commenting below!