As an e-Commerce business owner, knowing your site’s bounce rate can help you gain valuable insight into your website’s performance, customer experience, and user behavior. Besides the eCommerce design element, what tools are available to help you make sense of these critical metrics, and how can they help you improve the experience on your e-commerce site?
Here are practical tools to help you measure your eCommerce website’s bounce rate and track your site performance more effectively.
What is the Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is a metric to measure how many visitors are leaving your site after viewing only one page. The average bounce rate for an eCommerce site is between 60-70%. This means that the average website visitor visits just one page and then leaves the site.
You can calculate the bounce rate by taking the total number of visits and dividing it by the number of pages viewed. For example, if 50 people visited your website and each person looked at five pages, your bounce rate would be 10% (50/100=0.10).
A high bounce rate typically indicates that users are not finding what they’re looking for on your site or that design errors make it difficult for them to see what they want.
3 Top Tools
- Heatmaps
Heatmap is a tool that can help you better understand your visitors’ click and scroll behavior. It offers insights into how customers interact with your website content, giving you complete information on how far they interact with it.
- Session Recordings
One of the most potent session recording tools can help you review individual user sessions. It will show you every movement a user makes on your site and in what order they made them. By analyzing this information, you will see where users are clicking and discover why they might leave your site without converting.
- On-site surveys
What’s the best way to measure your website’s bounce rate? While many factors go into this, one of the most effective ways is by using on-site surveys. These surveys allow your customers to answer a few questions right after they visit your site. This helps you collect valuable feedback, which you can then use to improve the user experience of your website.
8 Ways to Reduce Your eCommerce Bounce Rate
Bounce rate has quickly become one of the most widely used and recognized metrics for measuring your eCommerce website’s success or failure. Consider these tips to reduce bounce rate:
1. Reduce Page-Load Speed
Users who experience a slower page load time are twice as likely to bounce. To reduce the load speed of your site, use these tips:
- Optimize images and compress them with a tool like Photoshop or GIMP.
- Remove unused scripts from pages that don’t need them.
- Use CSS instead of JavaScript for animations and transitions.
- Add a CDN like Cloudflare or MaxCDN to improve speed for visitors worldwide. Consider using Google AMP if you’re worried about mobile users being unable to access your website quickly enough.
When you implement these tips, your pages load fast and reduce bounce rate.
2. Investigate Your Paid Campaign Traffic
Traffic is the lifeblood of any business. No traffic, no sales. With that in mind, you want to ensure your paid campaign traffic converts rapidly. If it isn’t, don’t be afraid to look for new traffic sources and test different strategies.
Make sure your site looks good on all devices: Many people now browse the internet on their phones and tablets instead of desktops or laptops. You can see if your site looks good on these devices is to install Google Chrome’s Page Ruler extension onto your browser. It will let you measure any web page’s width so you can make adjustments if needed.
3. Ensure the Site Looks Trustworthy
Your website must portray a sense of trustworthiness, so customers will feel comfortable about making a purchase.
Create an engaging homepage with clear call-to-actions and well-designed product images—list contact information on the website, including phone number and address.
Include reviews from other customers who have purchased from your site or service before. Add user testimonials from people who have used your services or product for the first time.
4. Fix Irrelevant Copy
One of the best ways to lower your bounce rate is by making sure you’re sending customers on relevant and engaging journeys. You’ll need to identify which pages are essential for converting visitors into customers and ensure that these pages can only be accessed after completing a specific action. For example, if someone wants to purchase your product but doesn’t know what size they should get, you’ll like them on the choose a size page rather than the add-to-cart page.
5. Fix Usability Issues
Optimize your site for mobile devices. Mobile browsing is now the norm, with approximately one-third of all online shopping purchases on a smartphone.
Ensure that users can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily: This will help reduce abandoned carts and bounce rates since customers can find what they’re looking for fast.
6. Optimize Your Product Pages
Your product pages are essential to your site and can significantly impact your bounce rate. You must optimize these pages for conversion by including critical information about the product, showcasing its features, and making sure it’s clear how customers can buy it.
Include essential information about the product, such as size, material, color, and price. Add high-quality product images so customers get a good idea of what they’re buying.
7. Inspire Visitors to Browse
Ensure your content is easy to read and free of grammar or spelling mistakes. This is something that visitors will quickly note.
Another thing is to allow customers to filter products by price range, size, color, etc., so you will have to include information about sizing and care instructions on the product page and the shipping and return policies.
8. Identify User Objections
Users typically abandon your site for two reasons: they get distracted by another site or don’t find what they’re looking for on your site. To reduce your bounce rate, make sure you have a clear call to action and use persuasive language.
Communicate the product’s value in plain English to motivate them to stay on your site.
Animated graphics also grab attention and keep users engaged with the page, which decreases their likelihood of leaving your website.
