Google Analytics bounce rate shows you that half of your visitors that come to your website leave immediately. Majority of eCommerce websites have an average of fifty percent bounce rate, and no one seems to have a definite answer on how to lower it. Bounce Rate in simple English is the percentage of visitors who enter your website and leave within five seconds.
Could it be that you are not making the sales you hope to make because your nuking your traffic before it has a chance to even consider your products, or maybe it can be that your Facebook plugin is taking forever to load, or your inexpensive shopping cart is hosting your website on slow shared servers that are taking forever to render your website.
In this post I will explain how to solve your bounce rate once and for all, so you can put one more obstacle behind you and have a successful online business.
A high bounce rate can be due to a number of things, but usually falls into one of three categories:
Your technology is to blame or
Youre acquiring the wrong kind of traffic to your website or
Youre acquiring exactly the right kind of traffic to your website
Did number three throw you for a loop? Most people forget about the third scenario since most websites tend to fall victim to the first and second.
Think about this for a second, if you are truly getting the right visitors to your website and they are leaving than there must be something else that is causing them to leave.
WHY ITS IMPORTANT TO REDUCE YOUR BOUNCE RATE
Reducing the bounce rate on your webpages that have the highest volume of traffic from your highest converting sources means more engaged visitors and a greater chance of making more sales.
We were extremely concerned about this metric, so we solved it with TEA (threat and engagement analytics available only in Shopping Cart Elite). Here are the results from our findings and best of all if you use TEA you dont have to wonder what is causing your bounce rate because TEA will automatically tell you where you have a problem and how to fix it in the weekly performance report.
UNDERSTANDING THE CORE PROBLEMS
Real Visitors vs. Fake Visitors Real Visitors are Real Humans, and Fake Visitors are botnets (software that visits your websites and acts like a human). Botnets enter your website for data mining, clickfraud, and hundreds of other reasons. Google Analytics combines both Real and Fake visitors into their bounce rate metric making it completely useless.
Note: Since TEA can detect Real Visitors and Fake Visitors, we never consider fake visitors in the equation and from hereon I am assuming that you are using TEA, and 100% of your bounce rate is from real visitors.
Homepage vs. Webpage Bounce Rate Homepage bounce rate usually happens for technical reasons, while the product webpage or article webpage happens for poor user experience reasons.
For example, the homepage might have a Facebook plugin that freezes the webpage and your visitors are leaving. It may not happen to all your visitors, but it happens enough times to have a high bounce rate.
Another example is a product webpage might have a bounce rate because someone linked to you with a false advertisement such as Fr-ee samples because you offered it at one point, but when the visitor comes to your website they realize they have to pay for the product, there are no samples and they leave immediately. To fix this particular problem you can redirect traffic to another page when the traffic comes from that specific referrer (redirects are available in Shopping Cart Elite).
TOP EIGHT BOUNCE RATE REASONS GATHERED FROM A DECADE OF EXPERIENCE
TECHNICAL ISSUES
Third Party Plugins
Any Kind of Plugins on your website may become a potential bottleneck for loading your website. Ive seen Facebook Plugins downloading six megabytes of data to each homepage visitor. Ive seen a plugin called ShareThis take 35 seconds to load 50 percent of the time. Ive seen Google Analytics taking ten seconds to load causing the website to freeze. Bottom line is JavaScript plugins create a risk that your visitors will be frustrated, and they will leave.
To trouble shoot this, I recommend doing three things. First you must acknowledge you have a problem using TEA. If the real visitor bounce rate is more than five percent than you have a problem on your website.
Second, go to webpagetest.org and run a test against your website for a week. You may end up noticing that a certain plugin always takes forever to load. Third, you may install Pingdom performance monitor which tracks the frustration of each user based on the website load time.
Note: Get rid of all the plugins from your website, and only use third party plugins if necessary.
External Links
This is an incredibly simple concept that is still often overlooked, but if you're going to link out to a resource on your website, make sure you have it open in a new window instead of redirecting the user off your website. Even better copy the source content on to your own website and give them credit towards the bottom. Do not create banners or links that make your visitors leave your website. Do not post advertising on your website unless necessary. If youre trying to show authority of your social profiles (such as how many Facebook likes you have), then use a headline to advertise it instead of making people leave your website to see that information on Facebook directly. Make sure the banners within your website open in the current window, and any external links open in a new window.
Speed (or the lack of)
If you are using Shopping Cart Elite you will not have a website speed problem. If you are using some cheap hosting, or a $40 package with a competitor shopping cart, well you get what you pay for, and slow load time and slow website speed is one of those things.
Not Browser or Mobile Friendly
If your website looks like a collage on certain browsers or its so tiny on a mobile browser that your visitor would need a microscope to see anything or you mobile page look like crap (if you are using a competitor Shopping Cart chances are their mobile template is crap), then you will experience a high bounce rate from those particular visitors.
The best way to check is to use browserstack.com. Simply check every webpage of your website from every browser on Browserstack and make sure it looks great.
Error Pages
If you see that visitors are leaving your error pages, then you should either redirect them or turn a negative experience into a potentially positive one. Add a search box and a link to the homepage, add a bit of design and humor. Shopping Cart Elite can design a custom 404 page for your website.
MARKETING & USER EXPERIENCE ISSUE
Popups
Pop-up ads annoy people. In some rare cases they offer something worth the roadblock, but usually they disrupt the user experience. Unless you value new email subscriber more than the engagement of your visitors on your website, dont use them. If you do use them, make sure that the visitors who already subscribed to your list do not get the popups. This is something Shopping Cart Elite can track for you.
Bad Traffic
Bad traffic can be driven by keywords that are not targeted to your website, or when someone is driving traffic to your website for their own benefit. For example, if I refer you to a website to look at their trendy design, or impressive product webpage then you might visit the website and bounce from it within five seconds or trigger some other negative engagement metric.
As a result this will confuse the owner of the website when he evaluates the analytics. If you notice certain keywords that are sending you free traffic, or certain bad referrers are driving traffic and ruining your analytics data, then you can exclude them from the analytics altogether, so they dont confuse you.
Using TEA we automatically exclude fake traffic, we segment good and bad traffic, and you can exclude certain referrer from showing up as good traffic.
You must only be concerned about poor traffic if you are paying for it. If you are getting poor engagement traffic according to TEA and that traffic is coming from a paid referrer such as Google Adwords, then the goal is to eliminate the keywords and/or the referrers that are sending you that traffic.
Bad Experience
If you are 100% sure that none of the above applies to you, then the visitors are truly having an unpleasant experience on your website, and you should do something about it. Here is a list of things that you should consider modifying.
Add Video (without Auto Play)
No Poor Grammar
Improve your Product Web Pages
Improve your Product Selection
Create a mega menu for quick browsing on your website top menu
Make your search box stand out on the header of your website
Eliminate Dead Ends by creating additional links within your own website
Add Live Chat and indicate to talk to you if they cant find what they need in 10 seconds
Improve your Graphic Design to fit your target market
We usually find that if you did everything right, and you implemented a pleasant user experience, then you should experience zero to five percent real visitor bounce rate.
Achieving such a low bounce rate or no bounce rate on your website would be a true achievement, and you will definitely see an increase in sales.
If you need a better Shopping Cart system to improve your bounce rate, conversions and overall experience we recommend you try Shopping Cart Elite today.
