Defining - “bounce rate”
Visitor A arrives on a product page and leaves after a few seconds
Visitor B arrives on a product page and spends a few minutes on it before leaving
Do they both count as a bounce?
Why do you want to reduce bounce rate?
Bounce rate tells you that people are coming to your website but not finding what they were looking for
Not finding a product or service that lived up to their expectations
Ad platforms sees it as a poor signal
High bounce rate usually means your offer/service is weak for that reason your conversion rate is low.
Or that the medium/ad has a huge disconnect with the landing page. Ie. the visitor was expecting something else/better based on the ad.
So what are the “best practices” on fixing high bounce rate.
1. Is there a big disconnect between ad/landing page?This is a big one and if your ads shows something promising or your copy sells your services but your landing page is bad, then people will leave in a sec.You can usually tell if you place your ad side by side with your landing page and imagine what the visitor goes through…A common example of this, is when a brand launches in a new market and runs ads in the local language, but then the website remains in English. This will skyrocket bounce rate.
2. Are you using the area “Above the fold” to communicate what's important?
“Hooking” people with something they want.Images, gallery.Benefits that people care aboutAlluding to more things people care about
How to fix this:
Mirror what the best brands are doing ,but personalize it and make it fit your brand.
https://purplefire.io/dtc-landing-pages/
3. Eliminate DistractionsToo much, creates a dilemma. The feeling of being overwhelmed with choices. Not knowing where to start. Visual hierarchy is important
4. Increase site speed
Do your pages load in 2-3 seconds max? If your answer is “no,” This could be one of the reasons you’re experiencing a high bounce rate. In ecommerce, site speed is the name of the game. The faster your pages load, the better.
Make sure you clean up your scripts. This means they don’t all fire instantly.
Make them all run in a container in GTM.
Use lazyloading - delay content that doesnt need to load immediately.Optimize your images so they take less space without quality loss.Fix your code, get an expert to review it.Keep them on the site more than anything.
They might have clicked an ad to see your latest diamond rings, but maybe they want to buy a necklace at the end of the day.
5. Fix your UX - Bad UX is killing your “customer’s engine”I always say - think of every visitor as somebody driving a car with limited gas. Gas in this case is their patience. Once they run out, they are going to leave the website.The more you make them “work for it” to navigate through the site, the quicker you drain the last gas in the tank. Here are examples to make things easier:1. Make the search functionality easy to use and easy to find, like exposing the search bar.
2. Add image thumbnails next to your categories:
3. On collection pages, add additional relevant categories in the top of page.4. Make filters sticky - and removable by 1 click
5. Add an easy way to get back to the top of a page with a simple click.6. Make your collection pages “shoppable” by adding the ability to swipe to see more images and the ability to add to cart
The list really goes on. But you need to have this mindset all the time and constantly go through the store.
6. Fix - bugs and friction points
You should be looking over bugs all the time. This is easily done by watching session recordings and monitoring for what is known as “rage-clicks. This is a metric that hotjar and mouseflow collects. It basically tells you about visitors clicking on things that are not clickable or loading correctly. This is not hard to fix and on a weekly or monthly basis you should give a report to your dev with all issues found and get them fixed asap.