What’s Your Ecommerce Website’s Bounce Rate?

By Author: Jenny Pitula
Total Articles: 11
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What is Bounce Rate?
While it is hard to say what a good bounce rate is, it is one of the most important KPI that every e-commerce website should keep a close track. Visitors “bounce” when they land on your website and leave immediately without clicking through to visit other pages. For every 100 visitors, the amount of the bounce is the bounce rate.

The possible causes of high bounce rate:

There are many reasons why your visitors bounce off your site. Here are the most common reasons for a high bounce rate:

They landed on your website accidentally thus left immediately.
The navigation is too complicated to understand
They didn’t see relevant content they were looking for
Bad website design
The website took forever to load
They didn’t find the call to action
The content including text, images, videos and pop-ups looks intrusive
The website is not responsive–looks bad on smaller devices

Why does bounce rate matter?

Bounce rate simply tells you how useful and easy-to-use that your visitors find your website. However, high ...
... bounce rate is not necessarily an awful thing, it depends on the purpose or desired action you have designed for a particular web page.

For the product pages, you would want the bounce rate to stay as low as it can be. When a visitor land on your product pages, the ideal action would be that the visitor clicks the “add to cart” button and move further to the checkout page or click other product pages to continue exploring more products. Neither of the desired actions will happen unless a visitor click through other pages.

That being said, there are other scenarios where you don’t have to be panic when you see a high bounce rate. For example, when the call-to-action is asking visitors to fill out a form that doesn’t take them to another page, a high bounce rate shouldn’t be much of a concern. If you have the goals that only need visitors to stay on one web page to complete, you may not have to worry about bounce rate.

Lower the bounce rate

Even though there is no standard to identify a good bounce rate, your goal should be consistently lowering the bounce rate. Here are some tips for you:

1. Polish the content
If the bounce rate is high and the average time on site is low, you may consider providing more informative and engaging content. The two metrics indicate that people leave immediately because they didn’t find the content they expect.

2. Increase the page loading speed
A slow page loading speed not only down your website on Google search results, but also burns out your visitors’ patience. Just 1 second of a delay can cause 7% drop in conversion rate which you can’t afford to have.

3. Remove all disruptive UX
Have you ever landed on a web page and it just automatically play the video which scared you off your seat? You immediately left the page with the heart rate remaining high. Remove any disruptive UX elements including auto-play and pop-ups.