Beating your bounce rates: a guide

Author: Jen Pollard, Data Analyst

Bounce rates are one of the hardest problems to solve for online retailers. If potential customers are searching elsewhere because of low load speeds, or a site that looks messy on mobile, that’s genuinely going to cost you serious sales. So, we’ve put together a quick guide to get you starting to think about bounce rates, and why they matter to your online business.

What works?

According to most areas looked into, bounce rate can vary from 40%-60%, with a number of influencing factors, such as technology, origin, or device. In that range, a bounce rate as low as 40% is considered good, but anything closer to 60% is bad. If you’re over 50%, it might be time to look harder at what could be the issue with your website. 

Influencing factors

What influences good? Well looking at some of the controllable influences to a user:

• Origin. How are you driving traffic to your site?
• Technology. Does your site load fast enough or is the slow speed putting people off.
• Site type. Can people find what they want easily, or are they getting frustrated not finding departments, search functions, or the product that originally drew them from on an advert or the home page.

Factors that are harder to influence:

• Sector. Some naturally have a higher bounce rate than others.
• Device. Mobile has up to a 20% higher bounce rate than desktop. While you can influence this to a degree, you cannot influence what someone is using to visit your site.
• Attention span. Most users spend 15 seconds or less on the homepage of a site. If they can’t find what they want quickly they leave, or bounce. While you can try to negate this, you cannot account for every situation.

As you can see, not everything is something you can influence. However there are steps that can be taken to counteract some of the issues. 

Influence in depth

Device

It is noted that mobile users are more likely to bounce (by up to 20%) than desktop users. This could be a result of having a site that isn’t optimised for mobile visitors. Some things to think about:

• Is the search hard to find?
• Can you easily browse departments or is the menu frustrating on mobile devices?
• Are banners/headers taking up too much space so that the site content is lost below too much scrolling.
• Does the site have a mobile version or is it just trying to load the desktop which doesn’t work on a small screen.

For many people the internet is a bombardment of choice, a site needs to be up to their expectations, as easy as possible to find what they want straight away. As previously stated, users can spend as little as 15 seconds on a site, so making an impact early matters.

Origin

Possibly thought about less, but still very influential. How are you driving people to the site?

• Direct: visits where user navigated directly to URL of page
• Organic search: visits from organic (unpaid) search results
• Paid search: visits from PPC campaigns in search results
• Display: traffic from displayed advertising (e.g. banner ads)
• Referral: visits from users clicking on links from another site
• Social: visits from social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter)
• Email: visits from users clicking on links in email

Each one of these channels has its own associated bounce rate. The channel that sees the lowest bounce appears to be email. Driving traffic to your site through email campaigns seems to result in the lowest bounce rates. On the opposite end, Display ads seem to trigger the highest bounce rates.

Bounce rates by channel for shopping¹

If a visitor to your site has been referred, directly advertised to, or made a conscious choice to visit the site through a search, they will spend more time with you. However, some advertising seems to increase bounce rate, but this does also depend on the advert itself, how cut-through and convincing it is for instance. 

Banners ads, or display ads, are often seen as clutter, and sometimes are perceived by users as something they mistrust. Social ads interrupt a user's actions, so while they click on the ad, they are already in the midst of an activity, and are likely to feel the desire to return to it quickly. Emailing sees low bounce as people see the email and who it’s from and have generally made a decision to subscribe to a newsletter as they like a product, so opening it is already quite likely. A referral gives a sense of trust, as someone has said the product is good, peaking interest and driving traffic to your site.

Technology

A site that loads faster inevitably brings a lower bounce rate. Removing one of frustrations that has haunted web users since the early days of the internet. While this sounds anecdotal, it is also backed up by statistics. If your site loads within 2 seconds, your bounce rate can drop by as much as 9% compared to a site that loads in 5 seconds. This could drop you from over 50% (considered high) to closer to 40% (considered good). This will lead to questions such as:

• Is your site too complicated? Is there too much data to load for 2 seconds?
• Is your current platform too slow? Can they meet the demand of today’s users?

Sector

Your sector isn’t really something you can influence. What you sell is precisely what you sell. However it can be noted that certain sectors have much lower bounce rates than others. Does this mean they’re utilising better marketing strategies?

Looking at traffic sources could give some insight into why bounce rate is high, and steps that can be taken to lower them. Just because the sector bounce rate is high, doesn’t mean the site has to be.

TL;DR

Bounce rate is something that can be influenced by decisions made during website design. These include:

• Platform/technology (speed)
• Site design
• Mobile vs desktop experience
• Traffic origin. Getting people signed up to newsletters could give a boost in visit time/reduction in bounce.

Get your bounce rates back under control with Visualsoft, and work with the providers of the fastest eCommerce sites in the UK.

¹Bounce Rate Benchmarks: What’s a Good Bounce Rate, Anyway? - CXL