To Grow Your Business, Cut Your Website’s Bounce Rate

At Microsite.com, we were able to grow our business 14% in a single month by focusing on one metric of our website: the bounce rate. The key was not to focus on the bounce rate for all visitors but on a smaller segment of visitors based on where they came from. Here’s how you can build a similar strategy and execute it to grow your company’s bottom line:

The Bounce Rate Defined:

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who view a single page on your website then leave without visiting any other pages. Such visitors are viewed as landing on a page, called the landing page, then “bouncing” out without seeing additional pages.

With the growth of social media and the practice of “deep linking” – where websites link to secondary but more relevant pages on your site – nearly every page of your website becomes a landing page and therefore has the potential to impact your bounce rate.

The Importance of Bounce Rate:

The bounce rate measures the effectiveness of a landing page and its ability to make a good first impression and keep visitors engaged on the site. A high bounce rate generally indicates the site’s landing pages aren’t relevant or interesting to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and the more likely they will go deeper into your sales funnel.

It is true that in some cases, a page may be designed to give the visitor information he or she is looking for and nothing else. In this instance, bounce rate may not be a relevant metric.

A Good Bounce Rate:

Qualifying your bounce rate as good or bad depends on the objectives of your site and the purpose of the individual pages. Generally speaking, blogs and news sites that provide information on a single page tend to have bounce rates of 80% and higher. But those sites find this acceptable because they use other metrics to determine success, such as time on the page or number of repeat visitors.

Noted web analytics blogger and former Director of Research & Analytics at Intuit, Avinash Kaushik, suggests, “...it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

If you’re using Google Analytics, there is a benchmarking section that allows you to compare your site’s bounce rate and metrics to other sites based on size and category.

If you’re looking at your sites’s bounce rate for the first time, you can use those numbers as your benchmark, and work to improve them first.

Determine Your Bounce Rate Using Google Analytics:

To create a strategy for reducing your bounce rate, you first need to know where the visitors who are bouncing are coming from.

With Google Analytics, ferreting out these numbers is relatively straightforward.

To do this start by examining your Traffic Sources >> All Traffic Sources report.

On this page, you’ll find a table featuring the source of all your traffic in the left column. In the far right column is your bounce rate. Click on this to rank your traffic sources by bounce rate. Now filter out the sites which sent only a few visitors by clicking on the “Advanced Filter” option at the bottom of the table. Choose visits, greater than, and 5. Then click “Apply Filter.”

Now you can see which sites send visitors who have the highest and lowest bounce rates.

You can produce similar reports for keywords, geography, and so on, by clicking on those filters in the left column then sorting by bounce rate.

The purpose of this exercise is to identify where the worst performing visitors are coming from. Once you know this you can then start to analyze which sources of these visitors are important to your business and deserve your attention. You can also start to look at and adjust for elements you can control.

In the case of Microsite.com, we could see that some sites, such as stumbleupon.com, gave us high volume but also high bounce rates. We also knew from conversion data that these sites rarely produced buyers. (There certainly could be a correlation, but for the time being, we wouldn’t concern ourselves with those visitors.) Instead, we knew that visitors who found us through natural search on Google tended to have higher conversion rates. So these were the bounce rates we were going to focus on lowering. This turned out to be the right strategy.

Tips for Lowering Your Bounce Rate:

Most of the advice available online for reducing your bounce rate follows common sense and good design practice. We provide a comprehensive checklist for reducing your bounce rate here.

For immediate results and to produce the biggest impact for your efforts, we have found the following steps to be the most effective. These are based on our experience with hundreds of sites over the years and our most recent testing with Microsite.com.

1. Simplicity and Clarity.

Eliminate everything that doesn’t relate directly to your visitor and encourage the person to take action. Specifically:

Headlines: The page should feature a compelling, benefit-driven headline, which sharply contrasts with the background so it’s easy to see and read.

Images: Any image should be big, captivating and relevant, not extemporaneous.

Copy: Text should be succinct and contain the same language that drove the visitor to the page, such as reinforcing keywords or sales copy.

Navigation: The navigation should be obvious and direct the visitor where to go next. A simple fact: the larger the buy button, the higher the click rate.

Think of it this way, nothing should get in the way of the visitor going from A to B.

Microsite.com’s current design, especially its home page, is generating much better results than a previous, though similar version that offered many more choices. We cut out a great deal of explanatory text and click options, and our bounce rate – as well as our conversion rate – increased.

2. Avoid Unnecessary Gimmicks

Some sites load up on the surveys, pop-ups, and polls to encourage clicking. But if the purpose of the trickery is simply to lower your bounce rate, you’re missing the point of why visitors are coming to your site. Your visitor – don’t forget this is your prospect – is looking for value. Not games.

3. Page load times

First, Google hates excessive page load times. Second, your visitors hate them even more. Deactivate unnecessary plugins and optimize your images and code to speed up the loading time of your site. A faster load time, especially if your pages currently lag, will immediately lead to better bounce rates.

4. Our Best Advice

As stated previously, at Microsite.com, we determined that the most valuable visitors were those who came from a Google natural search.

Through a clickstream analysis combined with the visitors search term, we could tell that most were looking for Microsite examples and a better understanding of a Microsite strategy.

So we created a special page, “Why a Microsite,” that made the business case for a Microsite and provided great examples in a range of industries, from B2B to non-profit to government.

We also set up a dialog box that greeted visitors from Google who landed on our home page and suggested they click to the special page. The greeting only occurs once to avoid being annoying.

Try it. Go to Google and type in “microsite examples” or “microsite” and click on our link.

The combination of a simpler, clearer layout, which also reduced the page load time, and a dialog box greeting Google visitors, cut our bounce rate 50% and grew our sales 14%.

For Microsite.com customers, the greet box feature is now available on all solutions. Contact your account manager for details.

Summary for Selling Online More Effectively by Reducing Your Bounce Rate

• Analyze your bounce rate with Google Analytics
• Look to reduce the bounce rate of visitors who are important to your business, which means don’t work about your total bounce rate
• Simplify and clarify your layout, navigation, and text
• Avoid gimmicks
• Reduce page load times
• Offer a personalized message and link to specific visitors that takes them to a customized page with more information on the topic their interested in.

Works every time.

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