When a user arrives on your webpage, how long do they stay? Are they acting on your intended call-to-action, or are they quickly scanning your page and leaving?

Your Bounce Rate is the number of one-page visits your website receives. A high bounce rate equals lost conversions, and lost conversions add up to lost sales, so if your website has a high bounce rate, that is directly translating into lost revenue – and that isn’t good for business.

How Does Your Website Compare?

Bounce rates will vary by industry, but as a general rule of thumb, if you can maintain a bounce rate between 50-70% you’re doing ok, and if you can sustain a 30-50% bounce rate, you are doing better than most. By industry, data from Custom Media Labs shows that you want your website to be performing within, or better than, the following brackets:

• Ecommerce and Retail: 20 – 45%
• B2B: 25 – 55%
• Lead Generation: 30 – 55%
• Non-Ecommerce Content: 35 – 60%
• Landing Pages: 60 – 90% for landing pages
• Portals, Blogs, News, and Events: 65 – 90%

If your bounce rate is higher than these averages, something is causing users to abandon your website at a higher rate than your competitors – which is not good.

How to Improve Your Bounce Rate

The first step to resolving your bounce rate problem is identifying where the problem lies. Google Analytics offers a useful tool that allows you to see, page by page, where you are losing people. Once you have identified the lowest-performing pages, you can take some of the following steps to correct the problem.

1. Improve User Experience

People decide on the quality of your product or service within seconds of arriving on your page. The first hurdle that you must pass is impressing them with an outstanding experience and intuitive functionality. The user, how they interact with your website, how your site makes them feel, and the impression it leaves should be the primary focus of your website design. If your site is difficult to navigate, runs slow, or looks unprofessional, users will leave as quickly as they came, and most will not come back.

2. Highlight Your Call to Action

If you manage to get people to stay on your page, the next step is to get them to take the desired action with a well-placed, engaging call-to-action. Incorporate a message that resonates with your target audience and evokes a sense of urgency or enthusiasm.

3. Limit Pop-Ups

People generally don’t like pop-ups; however, they can be a useful marketing tool. The key to incorporating them on your website in a way that’s not going to turn people away is to:

• Limit their use
• Wait until the user is engaged
• Offer something of value

Pay particular attention to the fact that most web traffic now comes from mobile devices; if you are going to use pop-ups, make sure they are well-placed and easy to close.

4. Incorporate Engaging Content

Your content is only useful if it’s engaging people and offering them something of value. Everything you post on your site should be well-written, factual, relevant to your brand, and most importantly, speak to your target audience.

Keeping your content fresh is equally important to what you are saying when branding yourself as a trusted source for XYZ. Even if a user isn’t buying a product or service from you each time they visit, by interacting with your website regularly they will remember, and more importantly, trust you. A repeat visitor is worth far more than any amount of one-time traffic.

5. Target the Right Audience

Everything you write, post, or publish should be specifically aimed at your target audience. A higher bounce rate may not be the result of poor content or an unappealing user experience; you may simply be drawing the wrong people to your page – and wasting time and effort in the process. When you target the right audience, reach out to them in the right places, and provide them the right type of content, you are far more likely to reduce your bounce rate than if you throw everything against the wall and hope something sticks.

All the marketing in the world can’t save you if your website isn’t focusing on providing an exceptional user experience aimed at the right audience. These steps can help you improve your bounce rate – and your bottom line.

The post How Good is Your Bounce Rate, and What Can You Do to Fix It? appeared first on Nirvana Canada.