A R Website Design
If your website currently has a really high bounce rate and you are wondering just what you can do to bring this figure down and of course get more success from your site, we have come up with five simple things that you can do to look at trying to get more results from your online presence.
It is really important to look at your bounce rate subjectively, rather than looking at the bounce rate as whole. The bounce rate is counted when a visitor lands on your page and then moves away from your site without moving onto any other page. Although we discuss this further, a high bounce rate can happen for many reasons and is not always a bad thing, but generally, if your bounce rate is high you need to look at ways you can reduce it.
If you log into your Google Analytics account and take your bounce rate from an “all of website” point of view, then you are probably going to be looking at a figure that makes things look a lot worse than they are. Why? Well, unless you dig down into your traffic sources and / or page content, you are going to be seeing a lot of spammy referral data, which is not really real traffic but yet can still makes your bounce rate look incredibly high.
To show this point, look at the image below:
This site, as a “whole” has a bounce rate of around 70%, which is pretty high.
But, when you look at the individual source bounce rate above, it is clear to see that the not wanted and irrelevant referral data is making this higher, when in fact, our main sources of “good” traffic are generally below 55%, which is a big 15% difference when you analyse the success of your site. Of course, this is slightly higher than we would like it, but, it is a lot better when you look at your specific traffic sources before you take an overall glance and make a decision based on this figure, as it is so often heavily distorted by the traffic that we really do not wish to count.
So, how can we reduce these figures, let‘s look at some ideas.
Too much content, not enough content, badly displayed content, badly written content, the list goes on, but all of these things can have an impact. If the user hits your site and there is just way too much information, they may have a mind block and move on, and equally, if there are hardly any words and nothing to catch their attention, they may well move onwards. It is important to continually work with your text and content and try to introduce things to reduce the bounce rate, with Video and infographics a really good way of capturing your visitor‘s attention and making them want to see more of your company and your website.
Slow pages make people leave your site, so if your website is loading slowly and you have really bad optimisation that is slowing things down, then the time has come to get things sorted and make your page super quick. There are a range of free tools to check your speed on, our favourite is Pingdom, but you can check your Site Speed per page in Google Analytics, which will allow you to see if any of the pages are taking an age to load and therefore increasing your bounce rate because of it. People do not have the time to wait, as all they need to do is hit the back button and move onto your rivals in the search engine, so there is no point losing sales just because your site loads slower than a tractor driving through a country road.
This is even more important now that Google have said their next algorithm update will push your site down the mobile search rankings if it is not mobile friendly, but, your bounce rate could be high from mobile devices and tablets if your site is not working correctly on these devices. You have to remember that people make their mind up in seconds, not minutes when it comes to a website, so if you are seeing a really high bounce rate, check that your site works across all types of devices and if it doesn‘t, you really do need to get this sorted.
So, you have a brilliant campaign, some solid Adwords and Facebook promotion adverts running and the best email newsletter that you have ever made, but you forgot to complete the sales funnel on your website and have just sent the user to a page that has no chance of converting, because it has no call to action. This is a success killer and something we see so often. You need to make sure that when your visitor lands on your website there is a clear call to action, and by this, you have to almost guide them into their next steps. Is it a massive download button, easy to access phone number or simple quick quote form? No matter what your call to action is, make sure you have thought this through, as the moment they hit your site you need to make sure they know what they need to do, or more importantly, what you want them to do.
Our final point is once again along the testing road. Too many business owners set up an amazing campaign but forget about the end point, in this case the website or page they land on, so it can be worth trying a few simplified landing pages that are not anywhere else on your site to see if these work better because you are not shoving too much information in front of the user. You can try different combinations, lead magnets and offers, but sometimes it makes sense to simplify your offering and just get the user to do what you want, which when you take them away from the distraction of your site can really work well.