What Is A Good Bounce Rate For Ecommerce

The online space is a great place to get more customers, hold on to them, and maximize revenue. Of course, you already know that.

But because the digital space is highly competitive, you always have to keep an eye on the numbers to make sure potential customers are landing on your page, purchasing, and then coming back again. To bring them to your site, your digital marketing campaign is essential.

You'll have to generate content and try and reach new customers. However, even if you have an effective marketing campaign that is bringing you many impressions and clicks, that doesn't necessarily mean that the content and the marketing campaign is a resounding success.

An online marketing campaign's success is measured not only through clicks, impressions and a high conversion rate but also the bounce rate. And this article is all about bounce rates, what they are, how much is good and how you can optimize that number.

Just what is a bounce rate?

As you can understand from the term 'rate' in 'bounce rate', it is a number. A percentage to be more exact. And it is used to indicate how many people leave your page after a single visit to one of your pages.

What's the main take away? The lower it is, the better. You're obviously going to want people to stay with you browsing your other pages instead of just clicking at one, finding your page through a link or through a search engine, and then leaving immediately.

If that's the case, you probably haven't made a sale and of course, we don't want that. But you may still be asking, what exactly means leave?

Just to give you a picture, imagine someone gets to your page, and without visiting another one of your pages, decides to click the back button or closes the browser entirely or even types in another URL address in the search bar and goes there. That's what leaving means, but it is not only limited to those scenarios, you get the picture.

Why is it so important anyway?

It's kind of obvious. If people left after visiting a single one of your pages, it means that a purchase hasn't been made.

You've worked hard to get them to your page, but when they leave or more accurately 'bounce', all the work you put in to rank higher, to get the impression and the click goes to dust. After all, the reason you'd like your online business' web page to rank higher, is to make more sales, but if potential customers leave after just seeing the first page, all the time, effort and maybe ad money, goes to waste.

We wish that was the only reason you should maintain a low bounce rate, but unfortunately it isn't. If your page is getting bounced often, meaning if you have a high bounce rate, your search engine, let's say Google, will keep records and if it continues that way, your ranking will get lower.

This in turn means that a high bounce rate will not only cost you a sale, it will cost you potential customers in the long run. And if you're anything like us (or any other online business owner for that matter), you're probably convinced by now that you want a very low bounce rate. If you're asking 'how can I do that?', well...

Here's what you can do

First of all, you're going to have to acknowledge that your bounce rate could be high for a variety of reasons. Finding out just why it is high is your ticket down the road to a lower bounce rate and although we can't tell you every solution to every problem that is making the visitors of your page shy away after a few seconds, we will tell you about the most common ones so you can be on the lookout.

One reason is the speed of your page, how fast it opens. The internet is faster than ever and this has made users somewhat intolerant, they may even think that your page isn't working if it stays loading for a while. Make sure you're all set in that front.

Another factor that could be affecting bounce rate is the content and layout of your website. Your website has to convince the visitor to spend some time and money as well as proceed to another one of your websites and quality content and a clean layout goes a long way in playing that part.

Other reasons for a high bounce rate include technical errors, defects in usability, and pop-ups.

Make sure to fix these up and your website's bounce rate will come crashing down, the conversion rate soaring in the process. You can get some more helpful resources in other installments of our blogs, so stay tuned!