Bounce rate is a term that is often, dare we say it, bounced around in marketing circles. But not every business owner is quite clear on what it is and why they should care about it.
To put it in the simplest terms, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter your site and then leave it from the same page. These people only ever see just one page of your website. They more or less instantly either return to their search results page or close the tab your website was opened in.
Bounce rate shouldn’t be confused with exit rate, although it often is. Exit rate is the percentage of visitors to a certain page on your website from which they have exited to a different website. These visitors will have seen more than one page, so they will not have bounced.
One of the best ways to avoid a high bounce rate is to ensure that your website visitors are instantly engaged. In this post, we’ll be looking at ways to prevent visitors from being alienated by poor design or an inaccessible display of information.
Why Do People Bounce?
There are numerous reasons people will bounce from a page. They include:
- Not finding what they were looking for
- Misleading title and meta description
- Bad user experience
- A website that can’t be described in any way other than ugly
- Poorly written content
- Slow loading times
- A broken page
Fortunately, there is a way to reduce your bounce rates and hook your visitors instantly. Let’s dive into the tactics you can employ, hopefully with the greatest of success.
Consider Your Value Proposition
Your brand’s value proposition needs to be clear, specific, and focusing on the benefits for the visitor. Make it completely consumer-oriented instead of patting your own back for solving a specific problem. Highlight the value of your product or service, as opposed to its features.
Always put the solution in focus and address your audience’s pain points as well as you can. Remember, you also need to be succinct. A website visitor needs to understand immediately what it is that you do and how this will benefit them.
You do not want to force your potential customers to read through a thousand words of text before they get a strong sense of what it is that you offer them. This has to be instantly visible to them.
Take the Dress Forms USA website as an example. The header instantly makes it obvious to the visitor what the site does: sell dress forms. But in the space of 3-4 seconds, the header makes a bunch of benefits super-clear:
- The brand can be trusted.
- They offer free shipping.
- They offer wholesale prices.
- The company has been around a long time.
All of this incredibly valuable information is communicated as part of the value proposition. And it’s done so by using no more than 30 words.
Source: Dressformsusa.com
Improve Your Loading Speeds
Loading times are not only a ranking factor; they can also significantly (and negatively) impact your bounce rate.
People expect a website to load in a couple of seconds, while Google itself wants it to load in less than half, especially on mobile. We can argue that mobile loading speeds are more important, as surfing on the go demands practically instant response times.
Source: Section.io
If you discover your loading times are not up to scratch, there are several things you can do:
- Enable file compression
- Reduce image sizes
- Minify your code
- Cache your website
- Reduce the number of redirects
- Use a content delivery network (CDN)
- Reduce server response times
Ideally, you will hire someone who knows what they’re doing to tackle this part of the job, as there are a lot of technicalities involved, and you want to make sure you get it right.
Use Video on Your Landing Pages
To keep visitors engaged, you need to add an element to your landing pages that they can actually engage with. Simple copy and imagery may not cut it – unless you’ve matched their search intent perfectly.
Video is ideal for this. The engagement rate with moving pictures is astonishing when compared to simple text. On average, pages with video have a 34% lower bounce rate than pages without.
Even if you’re not able to add a video to every page on your site, you can certainly leverage it on some.
For instance, you can do:
- How-to videos offering tips on how better to use your product or service
- Video testimonials from your satisfied clients
- A message from your CEO
- Informative videos that explain what working with you will be like
- Promotional videos that additionally sell your brand
As long as you’re just a little bit creative and open-minded, you can find the right type of video for most landing pages. Remember: they need to load fast, and they need to be well-produced. You don’t have to film them with the latest professional equipment, but they do need to be edited professionally.
Security@me offers a terrific example of how to use video to explain a complex product to a target audience who may not be as familiar with the concept of digital security.
Source: Securityat.me
The video is entertaining, easy to follow, super-informative, and very short. In only 90 seconds, the brand has given their website as big a chance as possible at hooking their target audience and significantly lowering the risk of a bounce.
Use Chunking to Avoid Walls of Text
This tip should be applied to long content pieces specifically, and it’s not as relevant for product or service pages (although they need to be easy to digest as well).
Most people don’t read articles from start to finish. Rather, they like to read the headings, skim through the ones that seem the most interesting and relevant for them, and get a general gist of the post. They may read entire posts on topics that are of special interest to them or written by people whose opinion matters to them.
If a blog post is not formatted well, they will most likely refuse to read it altogether. How many times have you clicked off an article that was nothing more than a wall of text? The sad part is, some of these articles are probably excellent, yet most people give up on them simply due to poor formatting.
Here’s how to chunk your text:
- Use visuals to break it up. Rely on photos, illustrations, charts, and graphs.
- Use different formatting styles. Both bold and italics can make quite an impact.
- Keep your paragraphs short – 2-3 lines will do it.
- Use bullet points and numbered lists where you can.
- Use UI elements like call-to-action buttons and forms.
- Make frequent use of headings and subheadings to create logical content sections.
Dream Grow’s mammoth post on how to avoid mail recipients’ spam folders is a terrific example of chunking. The writer uses virtually every trick in the chunking book to make sure that the text doesn’t seem like an impenetrable wall of information.
Source: Dreamgrow.com
Hook Your Audience With Emotions
This tip is especially useful if you’re running a B2C company. Businesses tend to buy with their brains (stats and figures), while consumers tend to buy with their hearts (feelings).
A great way to ensure that website visitors are instantly engaged with your website content is to double down on the emotional selling.
This can mean many things. Obviously, your product itself should make your potential customers feel something: joy about owning something beautiful, relief over no longer having to deal with a particular problem, or even fear of missing out (FOMO) on a great deal.
Sola Wood Flowers hits a whole bunch of positive feelings with their emotionally impactful home page. The models that exhibit their products are shown in a super-happy context. The color choices and graphic design is lively and eye-catching. The text also communicates value and urgency: “Quick, there are only a couple of hours left before our sale ends!”
The design of this landing page works along with the copy to inspire excitement. The creators were smart enough to realize that these emotions are intertwined with their product and created a design that capitalized on this relationship.
Source: Solawoodflowers.com
Provide the Answer Early
This may seem a bit counterintuitive; however, it’s very important to provide the answer to the question that has brought your visitors to you early. As early as the first subheading, in fact, if not earlier.
If you’re thinking that this defeats the purpose and would rather place your answer at the bottom of the post, thus forcing people to scroll all the way down, you will end up doing the wrong thing.
When someone lands on your page, they want to spend as little time there as possible, so to speak. If you don’t give them a straightforward answer, they’ll just pack up and go look for it elsewhere.
If they do get the information they need, they are also likely to stick around and read the rest of the post. And they also might check out some of your other pages, since you’ve turned out to be such a good resource.
For a good example on how to do it in blog post format check out MedicalAlertBuyersGuide’s post on the top rated medical alert systems. The post provides the answer right at the top of the page and summarizes the best choices. It then moves on to summarize all the other contenders’ main features before providing plenty of additional detail.
Source: Medicalalertbuyersguide.org
This way, a reader can choose to read up on the systems they have liked, as opposed to reading a lot of content in order to gather very little information of interest.
Follow Through with Your Promises
Finally, let’s briefly touch upon the importance of giving your visitors what they were expecting to get. If your page title and meta description (i.e., the bits visitors see before they get to your site) have promised one thing but the page turns out to be about something quite different, they are practically guaranteed to bounce.
For example, you may be running an ad that promises a significant discount, but the page the ad leads to may offer no sale. It clearly won’t meet the expectations of the visitor, and they are very likely to leave straight away.
Make sure that you always consider all the ways a visitor can reach you when making changes to a page. If a sale ends, change your ad copy. If you no longer offer a product, remove it from your homepage meta description, and so on.
You also want to make sure that you get user intent right and align your pages so that they get what they’ve bargained for.
Consider what searchers want when selecting keywords to target, as matching search intent is a great first step to reducing bounce rate.
Over to You
Don’t be alarmed by a high bounce rate, as it’s probably not as bad as it seems. Work on reducing it by applying some of our tips, and determine how useful your pages actually are.
After all, only then can you hope to actually engage your visitors.