Lowering Your Webiste Bounce Rate | Learn how to attract prospects and convert them into customers-without breaking the bank!

July 15th, 2008

How to Lower Your Bounce Rate

If you take the time to build a web site, you’d like most folks to stay on it for a while. Visitors who show up and leave 3 seconds later aren’t generally helpful. What concerns me with search advertising is the bounce rate for a landing page. If you can’t move your visitors beyond the landing page, you can’t close the sale.

The value of having a unique landing page for every campaign, if not every ad group, should be immediately obvious. Sending loosely related campaigns to the same landing page muddies your view of visitor behavior and visitor behavior is what you’re trying to influence.

The question then is how do you move a greater percentage of your paid search traffic off the landing page? At this point, it doesn’t matter where they go, as long as they don’t leave your site. Eventually you hope they’ll go to your checkout page but at this stage, it’s small steps. The goal is simply to reduce the bounce rate per landing page.

You want to lower your bounce rate. Here are a few tips for doing just that.

What’s Bounce Rate, Anyway?

Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who visit a page on your site and then leave without looking at any other pages. It’s a good way to tell if that page is keeping visitors’ attention or not.

The bounce rate on your home page is particularly telling. Your home page should be pretty compelling for the folks who go there. Many of them just typed in your web address; others came from branded keyword searches; and still others may have found your address in an article or other literature. They’re the most-interested or at least potentially most-interested visitors.

The bounce rate on this page is a fairly ghastly 64%, but with 2600 unique views per day, I’m not worried….kidding!

Shudder. If the question is how to reduce bounce rate, the answer is targeting. Targeting is simply pitching your offer to the right audience, a receptive audience. Targeting, like every other aspect of search engine advertising, is about relevance. But the answer leads directly to another question. How do you identify the right audience?

Reducing Home Page Bounce Rate

But enough about me! Here are 7 tips I’ve found can reduce bounce rate. They really do work, unless you’re an overworked blogger who’s running an agency, writing a book and has 2 kids under the age of 10:

Answer questions. When someone comes to your site, they’re probably not thinking “Gee, I wonder what their office looks like.” Instead, they’re asking, “Do you have the mountain bike I really want”? Which question do you answer? Answer the latter and you’ll keep more visitors. (Inspired by Specialized.com)
Simplify. Believe it or not, every person in your company does not get to contribute one link to your home page. The average person is most comfortable processing 5-7 choices at a time. Don’t overwhelm them. Simplify by removing options or at least grouping and prioritizing them. How many links does Google have on their home page? How about Apple? Look at your traffic reports, find out what visitors really want, and then link to that and only that. If anyone in your office whines, blame me.

Remove autoplay videos. My first reflex if a video starts playing and music that sounds like a bad 70’s porn flick comes streaming out of my speakers is to hit the back button. I’m willing to bet most people feel the same way. Remove the video altogether, or at least have it paused.
Improve pageload time. If your home page takes more than 8 seconds to look intelligible, you’re probably shedding visitors. Note I said ‘look intelligible’, not ‘load completely’. If there’s a huge image or a video that takes longer, that’s OK, as long as it doesn’t prevent the rest of the page from loading. Trim 2-3 seconds off your pageload time and watch the bounce rate drop. Proof? When I first relaunched my blog, a bug in the code led to 10-15 second load times. Once we fixed it, the bounce rate dropped by 30%.
Write a better headline. A punchy, take-action headline will keep visitors. Instead of “Enterprise Security Solutions for A Web 2.0 Workplace”, try “Protect Your Network” (I made this example up).
Move the important stuff up. If you have a store, show products near the top of the page. If you’re promoting a candidate, put that message at the top. Always put your call to action up high, front-and-center. If you’re uncomfortable doing that, you may have the wrong call to action.
Dump the popup. I shouldn’t even have to say this any more, but if you have a popup or other annoyance on your home page, get rid of it. You’re losing a lot more than you’re gaining, plus you’re making me hate you.
Make incremental changes to your campaigns. Closely watch the bounce rate for the campaign’s landing page. If your change reduces the bounce rate, integrate it as a best practice for that campaign. If not, lose it. Online advertising is about experimenting, testing, and reviewing the data. Your web analytics are an integral part of that cycle.