High bounce rate is one of the most common conversion killers. If the majority of your users are abandoning your website on the first page, then you don’t have a chance to convert them into subscribers or customers.
Let’s take a look at what is bounce rate and how you can decrease it.
What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of users who land on your website and decide to leave without going to a second page.
A higher bounce rate indicates that you were not able to convince the user to stay and act on your call-to-action (i.e buy your product).
A visitor can bounce from your site by clicking on a link to a different website, clicking the back button to leave your website, closing the open window/tab, typing a new URL, or due to a session time out.
Now you’re probably thinking that’s just normal user behavior right? Well yes, it is, but there is such a thing as a good bounce rate vs bad bounce rate.
Let’s take a look at average bounce rate by industry benchmarks, and determine what’s a good bounce rate.
Average Bounce Rate by Industry + What’s a Good Bounce Rate?
You may be wondering what is a good bounce rate? Well, the general rule of thumb is that:
80%+ is very bad
70 – 80% is poor
50 – 70% is average
30 – 50% is excellent
20% or below is likely a tracking error
How to Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Identifying and fixing the problems with your landing pages can easily fix your high bounce rate problem. We will walk you through some of the most common pitfalls of higher bounce rates and how to fix them.
Before you start, it’s a good idea to identify your top pages with the highest bounce rate. You can do this by going to Google Analytics and clicking on Behavior » Site Content » Landing Pages.
Knowing the top pages will help you identify the problem areas and fix them.
Here are the 12 tips to reduce your bounce rate.
1. Provide a Better Overall User Experience
User experience is the overall feeling of a user while they are interacting with your website. Good user experience is when a user finds a website not only easy to use but also pleasing.
Creating a usable website that looks equally great on all platforms and devices is the first step in the direction. Carefully watch out how your users behave and what influences their decisions.
In this article, you will find many other tips which all fall under the user experience. Remember it is the overall feeling that a user experiences when using your website, so everything is part of the user experience.
2. Optimize Your Call of Action Placement
Most users decide whether or not they like a website in the first couple of seconds. Often with just a simple glance at the visible area without scrolling. This area differs from one device to another.
Now that you know what your users are looking at, you can optimize this area. It should immediately describe what you are selling and there should be a prominently visible call to action.
Make your call to action clear and honest. Misleading users will create a bad user experience which is the number one reason for high bounce rate and low conversions.
3. Improve Your Site’s Speed
As we mentioned earlier, users make up their mind about a website in the first couple of seconds. You don’t want to waste this time showing them a blank page loading scripts and downloading content.
Using tools like Pingdom and Google Page Speed, you can optimize every landing page on your site.
To speed up your site, you should optimize your images, use a Content Delivery Network, add better caching, and consider switching to a faster hosting provider.
One of the quickest and easiest ways to keep your website speedy is by using a CDN.
4. A/B Testing + Targeted Landing Pages
It’s possible that your headline or call-to-action is not working. That’s why it’s important to A/B test.
Use different content strategies on each page and run A/B split tests to see how each of them performs.
You can also create different landing pages, targeting different audiences, regions, keywords, etc.
If you are serving an international audience, then you can detect a user’s location and show them a localized landing page. Showing users content in their own language, currency, and cultural background greatly improves user experience.
5. Use Videos To Engage Your Audience
Videos are highly engaging and grab attention more than text or even images. You can use a fullscreen video as a background, or add it next to your call of action.
Videos are powerful. You can use animations, music, audio, narration, colors, and so many different forms of persuasion tools.
You can create a very effective video presentation with a small budget by hiring a freelancer.
6. Use High-Quality Images to Captivate User Attention
Images are another effective tool that you can use to decrease your bounce rate.
The reason so many websites use high-quality photographs as fullscreen backgrounds is that they have proven to be very effective. Companies like Google that were famous for their plain white background and minimalistic layouts are now using high-quality images on their landing pages.
You can purchase professional photographs from various stock photography websites. There are several online websites that offer royalty-free images as well.
You can use these high-quality images as fullscreen backgrounds, parallax backgrounds, background slides, or as inline images next to your call to actions.
7. Let Your Customers Speak for You
You will see it on many websites a tiny little testimonials slider, showing a quote from one customer at a time. While it does the job, you can make it a lot more effective.
Convert your testimonials into success stories with actual storytelling elements like audio, video, illustrations to showcase your clients. People love success stories and they would want to read more.
8. Plan a Consistent Content Strategy
While many marketing experts would recommend you to experiment with different content strategies, there is also something to be said about a consistent content plan. How can these two be achieved at the same time?
Actually, they can be, and many successful websites have them in place since the 90s. You need to make a content plan that allows you to use different content strategies at the same time.
Take a look at BuzzFeed and how their content strategy includes a growing list of social content platforms, mediums, and formats. From GIFs to slideshows, SnapChat to YouTube. If they think that their users would find something engaging, they use it.
You may not be running a business like BuzzFeed, but your goal is exactly the same as Buzzfeed. You want users to stay on your website.
9. Make Your Site Readable
Majority of content on most websites is in text format. It is unfortunate that this important part of any website’s user experience is often the most neglected one. Even in this list, it appeared at number 9.
However, it is one of the most important and crucial elements that could shape your site’s visual appeal.
You need to make sure that the text on your website is easily readable on all devices. It shouldn’t be too small or else users will have to squint or zoom in to read it. Use font sizes that are large enough on smaller screens.
Typography or readability is not just limited to choosing the font size and color. You also need to make sure that the text on your website looks beautiful. There should be enough line spacing, padding, and margins to make text look clean and beautiful.
Another important point to consider is the language and style you choose to use on your website. Use easy-to-understand language in a normal conversational tone.
10. Show Your Credibility
Consumers are getting smarter every day, this means that they go through careful examination of an offer before they make up their minds. After the initial assessment of your product, consumers quickly look around to find out how reliable your site is.
It is not easy to trust a new business with your money or information. A new user doesn’t know how good your business is and what kind of reputation you have earned.
Proudly display the glowing reviews of your product or services from third-party websites like Product Hunt.
Showcase your awards, endorsements, certifications, quality scores, and industry affiliations. Make your website secure and display safety seals. This builds user trust so they’re comfortable handing out their credit card and personal information.
11. Target Abandoning Users
Despite all your efforts, sometimes a user may still want to leave your website. It’s not your fault, maybe something came up in their personal life, and they just had to leave.
Now you have two choices: you can either let them go, or you can convert them into a subscriber.
Most websites just ask users for their email address. It allows them to stay in touch with the user by sending them relevant offers and eventually convert them into paying customers.
You can also show a last-minute discount with your exit-intent popup. But remember if a user decides not to avail the offer, then they can just close the window and never come back again.
If you combine an exit offer with a subscription form, this gives your visitors the chance to stay in touch!
12. Target Engaged Users
Often your engaged users can also bounce without taking any action. This is very common for blog posts and resources section.
The user came to your article, found what they wanted, and they leave (that’s normal).
But that doesn’t help your conversions. In this case, you want to show your users with the most relevant offer.