Do you know your Bounce rates from your business rates? If not, you’re in the right place. In this blog we’ll talk you through all you need to know about bounce rates and discover why knowing a little more about them could seriously help your e-commerce store in 2016.

What is a bounce rate?

Simply put, a bounce rate is the amount of visitors who come to your website, take one look at your homepage and then click away back to another URL. Needless to say, a high website bounce rate won’t have you jumping for joy if you’re attempting to sell products via the web. In most cases, your bounce rate needs to be as low as possible.

The importance of bounce rates in e-commerce

There’s no two ways about it – your store’s bounce rate really matters. E-commerce isn’t quite the same as say, selling a book in a bookstore. Novels with attractive designs, fancy covers and teasing titles can sell by the bucketload. Even if the content inside isn’t great, presentation alone is sometimes enough to convince a customer to give it a go and boom – that’s a sale. When you’re running a website store however, an attractive homepage doesn’t necessarily earn you money, but it certainly helps to keep customers engaged. If your homepage looks cluttered and unappealing, people can visit, scroll up and down, and then simply decide leave to leave and find another site, and you won’t have earned a penny.

A high bounce rate can be a good thing for, say, an informational site. Website visitors research a topic, find the relevant information online, and leave. Their knowledge has been enriched, and the website has done its job. For e-commerce though, a high bounce rate is not a good thing. You want browsers on your site to enjoy your homepage, click ahead, make a purchase, head to the checkout and eventually confirm their order – not linger on the homepage for a while and venture to another site.

Avoiding a high bounce rate

With all this in mind, what we can deduce so far is that a successful e-commerce site must be:

• Attractive enough to keep the visitor hanging around.
• User-friendly so that clicking ahead to another page is simple and easy to do.
• Scattered with high-quality content that piques the visitor’s curiosity so they visit further pages within the site.
• Full of incentives (offers/discounts/coupon codes/free delivery) for the viewer to click around the site and hopefully end up at the checkout.

When bounce rates aren’t bad

More often than not, a high bounce rate is rough news for an e-commerce site, but you really ought to sit and consider the stats before you go making dramatic changes. For example, if you sent out an e-mail one week to all of your customers convincing them to purchase a particular pair of trousers at a discounted price, your site may have a high bounce rate during those 7 days as customers click the link and examine the offer. In this example, the high bounce rate isn’t a bad thing. Customers have seen your message, visited a particular page on your site, and got what they needed quickly without having to loiter around. They’ve bounced away, but they’ve put money into your coffers whilst doing so.

Your store’s bounce rate matters, and when this stat on your homepage is high, you need to think about ways in which to redesign, rewrite and restructure your e-commerce site.

Need help?

At Bing Digital, we have a terrific team in-house ready and waiting to help you lower your homepage bounce rate and keep customers clicking in all the right places. To find out more, take a look at our e-commerce services or give us a call on 020-8242-1954.

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