Depending on who you are talking to in the marketing industry, bounce rates are extremely important. Many digital marketing professionals believe bounce rates to be arguably the most important metric in content analysis. Yet, so many people, business owners, marketers, website developers, don’t understand what this metric is really measuring.
In layman’s terms, a bounce rate reflects the percentage of people who visit your website and leave directly after it loads. This person either had to click on a link, do a search or type in the URL to your website, but upon arriving, they decided to leave without any other action. A visitor can leave by pressing the “back” button, closing the browser or typing in a new URL – either way, the person left your site and decreased your opportunity to boost lead generation and sales.
So essentially, a high bounce rate is the enemy of everyone. Thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands are spent each year to increase the number of people who visit a website. However, if these visitors simply leave the site without spending any time on it – then what’s the point?
Businesses need to make sure the first impression their website is the right one. Many companies seek out experts in this endeavor by contacting a creative employment agency because the professionals found with the services offered by recruiters have skills that have been vouched for. Marketing strategists are outfitted with the right knowledge and skills to understand how to optimize pages and improve layouts to decrease bounce rates and, hopefully, improve lead generation and sales.
Here are five ways to decrease bounce rates:
1) Know your numbers. Before you’re able to begin improving your site, it’s crucial to know what the average bounce rate is for your site and for the industry in general, according to The Daily Egg. A marketer will be better able to implement a plan of action and gauge stages of success with these two figures. For example, you won’t be driving yourself insane and pulling out your hair about reducing your bounce rate by significant volumes if you know what is considered a perfectly normal bounce rate for your industry – a number that is most likely to stay the same.
2) Make your website mobile friendly. According to the Monetate Q1 2013 Ecommerce Quarterly report, mobile share is now hovering around 20 percent for the first quarter in 2013 – almost double what it was in the first quarter of 2012 in a year-over-year comparison. For the first time ever, tablets exceeded traditional desktop services for conversion rates. This suggests that people are becoming increasingly comfortable with making purchases on tablets and spending more time on e-commerce sites with mobile devices. To decrease a bounce rate, a business will need to make sure that its website is mobile friendly. As a result, responsive web design is growing as a movement so that regardless of what device a customer is viewing a website on, the design of the site alters itself to fit the screen and function normally.
3) Improve website design. A poorly designed website is the ultimate way to increase a bounce rate. Visitors take one look at a site and quickly determine its worth based on its design. However, web design is now a more inclusive term and goes beyond whether a gradient is used and now includes the entire user experience. A visitor should be able to easily navigate a professional looking website with the help of descriptive title pages and drop-down menus. From the color scheme to the main menu, a website must be designed to impress a visitor based on its quality.
4) Check browser compatibility. Often, developers only check the appearance of website using the browser they used to build the site. This can lead to problems when the site loads and appears differently on other browsers. Search Engine Journal reported that to prevent this situation, it’s important to check the appearance and features of a website on a variety of browsers. The site recommends the cross-browser compatibility testing tool Browser Stack to make sure integration and usability is cohesive regardless of what browser is used. Improve bounce rates by ensuring that visitors can use a website on a number of different browsers without problems arising.
5) Properly optimize content. Creating a content strategy that is search engine optimized is useless if the content is directing visitors to the site with unrelated links, keywords or topics. Narrow the focus of a SEO strategy to ensure that visitors are clicking on links to your site for the right reasons – potentially lengthening the time people spend on the website, improving bounce rates and boosting sales and lead generation.
Now that you have decreased your bounce rate, you can begin focusing on increasing your conversions.
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