Sales & Marketing Director | Co-Founder
Posted: 24 Mar 2020
When recently investigating why a client's eCommerce website was getting below par sales, we came across their key problem - a high bounce rate. The bounce rate is often an overlooked, and confusing, stat amongst your Google Analytics tools. In basic terms, the bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on a page of your website and leave (or bounce) without visiting another page. A visitor bounce is caused by:
For this specific client, they were getting great traffic through to their website from organic search results (SEO) and pay per click results (Adwords) but getting a very high bounce rate on their internal product pages. We narrowed the problem down to their content. It was too wordy and not actually describing their products clearly enough. We ended up replacing their long descriptions with short, to-the-point, bullet points. This instantly had an effect on their bounce rate, and in turn, their conversions.
Well the technical answer is both. If a customer is just looking for your phone number, hits your contact page directly from a search result, closes the browser and calls you. Then you can consider a high bounce rate to be a good thing here. But, if a customer hits one of your service pages directly from a Google search, and then leaves to visit a competitor, then a high bounce would be a very bad thing here.
So what is an acceptable bounce rate? Well this really depends on your industry and what type of site you are running. If you have a lot of confusing, interlinking pages you might see a lower bounce rate to someone who advertises their prices on their front page. Both have good and bad points associated to them. If you are getting anything about about 20% then you are doing quite well for yourself and holding traction with your online customers. If you are anything over about 40%, then you might want to look at what you're doing and what pages this is happening on.
Firstly analyse why you think your visitors are leaving your website. Here are a few main causes:
Sales & Marketing Director | Co-Founder
Working in the SEO industry for many years alongside some of Australia’s biggest brands, James started his online career running online Sports Fan sites, as well as cutting his teeth on several successful eCommerce brands and content sites.
Previously holding various senior roles across the Sales and Marketing teams for ASX listed companies, he went on to found Optimising with Daniel and is proud he has helped mould it into one of Melbourne’s leading SEO agencies.
When he’s not in the office he’s at home having pretend tea parties, or building a cubby house in the lounge room with his three young girls.
Optimising has been awarded Google Premier Partner status in 2022, recognised for being a leading Australian PPC agency.
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