Have you ever walked into a store, only to immediately turn around again and walk right out? Perhaps you had realized that you had been mistaken about the type of products for sale in the store or perhaps you simply didn’t like the look or feel of the store once you’re there, so you immediately “bounced.”
The percentage of customers who immediately leave your website having seen only a single page is also known as your bounce rate. It’s the equivalent of leaving a real-world store immediately because of your first impression.
The bounce rate of your e-commerce store is, therefore, an important metric to keep an eye on. Of course, a lower bounce rate is preferable, and we should always look for ways to improve bounce rate.
What Is The Average Bounce Rate?
Bounce rates vary by industry. For example, the bounce rates of reference, science, and food and drink websites are among the highest, with an average of over 60% of visitors immediately leaving the website after viewing just a single page. Industries like real estate and games have lower bounce rates, closer to 45%.
Bounce rates also vary based on the title page. A blog, for example, may have a bounce rate of between 70 and 98%.
The average e-commerce page bounce rate is around 45.7%.
Why Does Bounce Rate Matter?
Firstly, any bounce from your website means that the visitor did not go on to become a customer. You failed to convince them to make a purchase.
Secondly, Google records bounces and uses bounce rate metrics to decide upon your rankings in the search results. If you have a high bounce rate for a search term, Google will consider that you were not able to solve the visitor’s problem, ultimately demoting your website’s authority.
Why Is My Bounce Rate High?
Reasons for a high bounce rate include:
- Your content does not engage the reader.
- Your content does not answer the reader’s question.
- Your content does answer the reader’s question, and they see no reason to browse further.
- Your navigation options are difficult to understand or hard to find.
- Your website has an unappealing design.
- Your website loads slowly.
- Pop-ups or other intrusive ads are interfering with the user experience.
- There is no call to action.
- Your website is attracting the wrong type of visitors for your content.
In fact, there are hundreds of things that can be causing your bounce rate to be high, and each of them requires a particular remedy. Let’s look at just some of the ways you can improve e-commerce bounce rate.
1 — Streamline the Shopping Experience for Visitors
An overly complex e-commerce experience is frequently cited in surveys by visitors as a reason for abandoning a website. If there is any point on your e-commerce site where the shopper has to spend too much time understanding the checkout process, with today’s low attention spans the shop will head to your competitor instead. This is especially true if the shopper is doing comparison shopping.
With personalization from DataCue, you can remove many of the confusing obstructing UI elements traditionally seen on e-commerce sites and show the user only what they want to see. The checkout process can be streamlined, having automatically filled in much of the user’s details. Annoyance at long forms, concerns about payment options, and the shock of unexpected shipping costs can be reduced or eliminated completely.
2 — SEO Optimize Your E-Commerce Product Pages
Optimizing your e-commerce product pages for SEO not only ensures that your pages appear prominently in relevant search results but can also improve the quality of visitors that you receive.
Using rich snippets, for example, allows Google to display more of the important details about your products in the search results. As people are able to see ratings, availability, price, and a good summary description in the search results, they can make a more informed decision about whether to visit your store or not. This can drastically improve bounce rates, as you no longer have people mistakenly visiting your product page in error.
You also need to sell the product convincingly. Adding videos to e-commerce product pages has been shown to increase the average value of orders by up to 50%. Customers are between 65% and 85% more likely to purchase from you having watched a video. High-quality images, videos, and FAQs all contribute to convincing a visitor to purchase your product, reduces bounce rate, and therefore improves your search engine rankings.
3 — Segment Your Visitors
Using all the information that we know about a website visitor we can offer them a personalized version of the website that speaks to them. The amount and type of personalization that you perform is only limited by your imagination.
For example, a simple personalization step is to consider the geographical location of the visitor. If you run a ticketing store, it would pay to begin by showing New York visitors tickets to events in New York rather than those in San Francisco.
Using information about the search term the visitor used to reach your website (or the linking website), as well as the pages they interact with on your site, using a personalization tool like DataCue you can dynamically build a personalized website just for them, improving bounce rates significantly.
