eCommerce

15 Strategies to Improve your eCommerce Bounce Rate

Lilla Stefanovszky

Lilla Stefanovszky

Apr 05, 2021 · 12 minutes

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Many eCommerce stores are struggling to stay alive due to visitors finding the store but not ending up purchasing.  Unfortunately, as long as you can not convert your visitors to customers, your website will be in the same shoes. If you feel like that despite your best efforts in paid advertising and your appealing website, your visitors still bounce off your page, you need to read further. We are here to help you with understanding and improving your eCommerce bounce rate. To be able to improve your shop’s eCommerce bounce rate it is crucial to understand exactly what it is. This article will help you with 15 tips to improve your eCommerce bounce rate and your website’s performance.

What is bounce rate and why is it important?

When visitors come to your website and leave without visiting more pages apart from the initial landing page, that is when we say they “bounced”. Once you have successfully driven traffic to your website you would want your visitors to stay as long as possible. As the average eCommerce bounce rate is a ratio, the best way to explain it is the number of bounces for every 100 visitors. As an example, if 1000 visitors land on your page and 634 exit without clicking through to other pages the bounce rate would be (634/1000)x100=63.4%.

This metric is provided by most eCommerce analytics programs or on the back-end of your site. This can be used as a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) of your store that helps to analyze, assess and monitor the traffic. It is hard to tell what is the ideal average eCommerce bounce rate, hence it is better if you take an interval as your benchmark. For eCommerce websites, it is between 20% and 45%. With these in mind, let’s see the strategies that will help you improve your eCommerce bounce rate. If you follow our tips below, you will certainly increase the time spent on your site and conversion rate alike.

Responsive design

With the ever-growing number of mobile device users, it became highly important to optimize your site for these platforms. Not only to enhance user experience but also to keep visitors on your website longer. It is proven that desktop users are less likely to bounce than those who view your store on mobile. Tablets are falling somewhere in the middle. Mobile and tablet users are more likely to leave your page to open another app. For this reason, you might also want to consider creating mobile-specific landing pages or an app for your business.

Speed is curtail

The more we use the internet for browsing and interacting with others the more impatient we get with loading times. This is the first and foremost important factor when visiting a website. If your visitors have to wait longer than a couple of seconds, your bounce rate will increase with each extra second. Statistics show that slow loading sites have a 72% higher bounce rate than fast loading ones. Moreover, a fast-loading website can also help you achieve a higher ranking in search engines.

Site speed can be improved in several ways. Firstly, you should try to improve your server response time. This can be done by detecting and eliminating bottlenecks such as low memory, slow routing, and slow database queries. Secondly, make sure your images are the right size. Images that are larger than needed to be can also slow down the loading speed of your website. And finally, try to minify your HTML and CSS code and remove the parts you are not actively using. This can also dramatically improve your visitor’s experience.

The use of the right pop-up modal boxes

Pop-up modal boxes can on one hand increase your bounce rate and on the other hand increase your conversion. It is highly important to understand when and what type of pop-ups you should use. If it shows up too early and requests feedback from a visitor it is likely to be annoying for your customers. But if it pops up too late, your customer is likely to wander off to another website already. However, perfect timing and an appealing offer can not only keep your visitor in your eCommerce store but can potentially convert them to customers. The last thing you need to pay attention to is to make these pop-ups easily closeable. We all know that there is nothing more disturbing when you are unable to close a modal box. This is important across all device types so make sure you optimize for mobile as well.

Have a clean outlook

If your home or landing page is packed with information it can serve as a distraction and result in an increased eCommerce bounce rate. A simplified design and limited options can help your customers to have that crucial first glance at your business. Once you have captured their interest they are more likely to stay on your website and click through to other pages as well.

Turn off autoplay on videos

Videos are great means of engaging your visitors and keeping them on your website longer. If a video is well created and speaks to your visitors, they are likely to watch at least a part of it if not in whole. This can increase the time they spend on your webshop. But be aware! If you do not switch the autoplay function off then your video will play regardless of your visitors wanting it. Unfortunately, this can easily annoy them and make them bounce immediately.

Smooth navigation is a must

In order to understand how your visitors want to navigate on a page, you will need some intuition. But luckily, there are tactics that will definitely help you to improve the user experience. Create a bold, easy-to-use menu either on the top of your page or on the left-hand side. Make sure that it sticks there so visitors do not need to scroll all the way up to search for pages. For a mobile-friendly look and to not disturb your content make these collapsible into a hamburger menu. Test out different layouts as one option could work better for you than the other. Also, do not forget to create a site map at the bottom of your page. Here you can link all useful and important pages for easy access.

Good design as a measure of credibility

When it comes to eCommerce websites, people are quick to judge them by their design. This can play a great role in influencing your visitors’ perception of your credibility. Invest in a clean, uncluttered design to elevate the trust in your business. Also, do not forget to pay attention to consistency across the pages. Make sure you have the same color scheme and fonts throughout your website. This will help to ensure your business and you as a seller are both taken seriously.

Make searching easy

One of the most common reasons for a high eCommerce bouncing rate is if a visitor can not find what they are looking for. One of the things you can ensure that searching is easy is making your search bar as visible as possible. Visitors must be able to find it and see it clearly at the first glance. Furthermore, make sure that the size of the search bar is also adequate enough. If not all characters are visible when searching for a longer keyword it can make it difficult to review or edit a query. But unfortunately, these formalities are not enough on their own. Most importantly, when a customer is searching on your website it is inevitable that the correct search results are showing up.

Excellent product pages

Product pages are the heart of all eCommerce websites, so you want to make sure you are doing a great job with setting them up. First and foremost you have to have professional photos that represent the goods you are selling in the best possible manner. This should be followed by the most important information about the item at the top of the page, so your customers do not need to search for these. Besides the core information, try to include as much additional information as possible, such as dimensions, specs, and materials used. Finally, make sure your visitors have no trouble with adding an item they like to the cart with an add-to-cart button that really stands out.

Always have a FAQs page

Having a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page is useful for many reasons and can also help in reducing the eCommerce bounce rate. Having all the necessary information available at your visitors’ fingertips can not only reduce bounce rate but also can help with conversion. Moreover, a frequently updated FAQs page can increase your credibility and eliminate potential misunderstandings in the future as well.

Offer live chat customer service

If you want to take your customer service up a notch you should also try to incorporate a live chat into your website. As you can not possibly be ready to answer questions 24 hours a day, you might want to try a chatbot first. But make sure you input all the possible questions and answers for those that you can think of. Sometimes you would be surprised about the questions customers can have so be prepared for everything. If you have the privilege to have a customer service team, make sure they are well trained as they will be the voice of your brand. Representatives can not only decrease your bounce rate but can turn visitors around and convert them into customers.

Use heat maps

Heat maps allow you to see what customers see and interact with on your website. There are two types of heat maps you would want to consider using, scroll maps and click maps.

On one hand, scroll maps can be put on your home or landing pages where the eCommerce bounce rate is high. The content a visitor sees on your page once landing on it is called the “above the fold” section. As not all screens have the same sizes, you will want to watch out for the average fold line first. This section should contain the most important information relevant to your customer. If you manage to capture their attention, you will see that they are scrolling further down on your page or click further on your site.

On the other hand, click maps will help you to see where your visitors are clicking within a given page. The ones that are bouncing are obviously not clicking on anything. But with this technique, you can filter out if they might be confused by the design of your website and try to click non-clickable elements. This can help you with improving your website even further in terms of design and usability.

Eliminate usability issues

Trialing your website after every alteration is a must to make sure you do not have usability issues. These can be faulty drop-down menus, 404 errors, broken links, or issues with your responsivity on mobile devices. Such problems are likely to drive away your visitors from your website, so smooth operation is crucial. You can analyze usability by watching recorded sessions of individual interactions on high bounce rate pages. You will be able to see what is the step or moment where the visitors decide to leave your page and you can fix it easily after.

Monitor traffic from your paid advertisements

You should constantly monitor and analyze the performance of your paid ads in terms of bounce rate. Whether it is a shopping campaign, paid search result, or a social media advertisement it might bring in visitors that bounce quickly. Find the source where you get the most bounces from and reevaluate your strategy. Have a look if the keywords your visitors are searching for are aligned with what they are finding on your landing page. Also, analyze if visitors are actually finding what they are looking for on your landing page. And finally, make sure that the content of your ad is in line with the landing pages they direct visitors to.

Champion copywriting

Make sure to write an informative, easily digestible, and persuasive copy on your page. This will help you to engage your visitors in the next step you want them to take. Whether it is visiting another page of your website, adding an item to their cart, or signing up for your newsletter they will be more willing to do so. A clear copy that answers all the key questions can also help you with increasing your conversion rate. If your copy is poor it will not engage your visitors and you are risking an increased bounce rate.

Conclusion

No matter how low your eCommerce bounce rate is on your website, your aim should always be trying to lower it further. Going through all the abovementioned suggestions could be a good start to see which areas you are championing and on which you are falling behind. The goal is to make your visitors feel that they will find what they are looking for on your website. This will not only turn your visitors into customers but can also have a long-term effect and convert them to returning customers. And as we all know, reliable returning customers are the most precious assets of any business.

About the Author

Lilla Stefanovszky

Fashion marketing professional turned digital marketer. My name is Lilla and I have been working in the fashion industry for 5 years. Currently working at BrandsGateway and helping with the development of the marketing strategy and on occasions writing articles for our audience. When away form the computer, I enjoy outdoors and running with my dogs.