As an e-commerce website owner, your primary goal when it comes to website metrics is to lower bounce rate, increase link juice, improve user experience, etc., to ensure that your site ranks higher in the SERPs. But what if users abandon your site and never go to other pages?

This article answers about bounce rates and what their effects are on your e-commerce site. Plus, we’ve also included a few tips you can use to ensure your potential customers stay on your site a little longer!

Digging deep behind high bounce rates

In recent years, the use of bounce rates has become more and more popular due to its effect on rating. With bounce rates, webmasters can determine whether site visitors leave the landing page and move on to other pages, or if the interaction stops on the landing page.

If a visitor opens one page and gets out of there, the session will be counted as a bounce, which is not acceptable for the majority of websites on the Internet. During bouncing, only one request is sent to the Analytics server and it is not followed by any other requests during that session.

Since no other requests are sent to the Analytics server, it will be impossible for them to calculate the duration of the session, which means 0 seconds will be logged for that session.

So, if the percentage of visits to your site is marked as bounce, but your primary goal is to send visitors to more relevant pages, your site may not be performing well.

High bounce rates and e-commerce

If you’re running a one-page site, the high bounce rate shouldn’t be a concern. However, if your site is for an e-commerce business, you should start to worry.

On most e-commerce sites, the home page is where potential customers reach; From here, they will navigate the website through reviews, blogs, product pages, and hopefully, navigate to the checkout page.

But if your site turns out to have a high bounce rate, it could mean that the potential customer has already lost interest while on the first page. If this happens, you should start analyzing your landing page and thinking about why a potential buyer would leave your site.

Bounce rates: why do users leave a website?

If you ask, “What would contribute to a lower bounce rate?” So the most common answer to that is to increase the time visitors spend on the site. But wouldn’t that be difficult? Yes it is possible. But it is worth the effort.

There are two categories for why visitors leave your e-commerce sites: technical reasons and content and design reasons.

Technical reasons

At this age, one of the reasons that annoy site visitors is slow loading. When this happens, you run a huge loss because once your potential customer leaves the site due to long loading times, they will go to your competitors whose sites are “more efficient”.

It’s pretty hard to say, but when the page loads so slowly, most visitors won’t want to know why; They will immediately assume that your e-commerce site is not working as it should.

The good thing to remember here is that most consumers expect the site to load in just 5 seconds. So, if your site isn’t, you should look into it. According to professionals, one of the reasons for slow loading times is large images. Make sure to check out your photos first when analyzing your site!

• Your site doesn’t look secure

Scammers are spreading all over the internet, and many people are now security conscious. When visiting a website, users will usually look at the site’s URL to check if it starts with “https” because it means your site has an SSL certificate.

If your site does not have it, there is a good chance that the visitor will leave even if your site contains what they need. When there is no visible evidence on a site that it implements security measures, it will be difficult for a visitor to trust everything on it, and difficult to buy something from it.

By running a secure site and demonstrating that your products and information are trustworthy, your visitors will stay longer and may buy something nice for themselves!

• Too many popups

What’s more annoying than slow loading? Too many pop-ups. Yes, having too many pop-ups on a single page can disrupt a good user experience. Imagine reading something and then suddenly, a huge popup blocking the information.

When this happens, the user usually gets upset and leaves your website. To make sure that your pop-ups won’t annoy your visitor, install apps that track a user’s mouse and detect when they’re about to leave a website. This is when the popup should display.

• Your website is not compatible with mobile devices

Since many web users nowadays use their phones to scan websites, apps, etc., it is better if you can set up a website that can be displayed properly on any type of device. With a mobile-friendly website, they can search for the products they want to buy without zooming in and out of the websites viewed on the phone.

Reasons for content and design

• Exaggerate the design of your website

We know that an unattractive website will turn customers away. But, what happens when a website is over-designed but functionality is not very good?

In fact, users will not be allowed to stay. The key in creating a design is to create a balance between the design and the functionality of the website. Focus on removing clutter that can annoy users, choosing appropriate color and font combinations, and making sure that users can easily read text and navigate the website.

Lots of websites lean towards minimalist designs, so why not give it a try too?

• Failed to upload or share images

What’s more frustrating than not seeing a picture when it’s supposed to give you a visual of what you’re reading?

When images are not uploaded, the connection between your content and your visitors may be lost. This is why it is essential to ensure that your images are uploaded correctly and are compatible with your target market.

So, choosing the right images for your content is also one of the reasons why users lose participation in the site.

• Inaccurate or outdated content

Keeping your content up to date is excellent for ensuring that your site remains a source of information in your industry. With outdated or incorrect content, users will consider your website untrustworthy, which means they will look for other ways to find reliable information – your competition.

To make sure that your visitors won’t buy from other e-commerce sites, always keep your information up to date and do proper research on your topic so you don’t miss out on important details.

• Difficult to navigate your website

Not finding what you’re looking for would annoy anyone. This applies to web users as well. If you’re looking at the product page of an e-commerce site, but can’t seem to identify the button to it, you’ll probably get annoyed and leave the site.

Keeping your customers engaged isn’t just with great content; Keeping your website organized and clutter-free can also contribute to user interaction. The next time you look at your website, identify the things that fit our suggestions and try to do something about it.

Perhaps, it only takes a few times to resize or remove images, make tweaks to your design, or make tweaks to the back of your e-commerce site to engage more users and lower bounce rates.

Understanding bounce rates

We’ve provided factors that can affect user interaction and bounce rates, but to ensure you understand the root cause of your site’s high bounce rate, it’s best to check your site properly. Here are some of the reports you can analyze:

• Audience Overview Report You can use this report to check if the bounce rate issue is rampant all over your website as it provides the overall bounce rate for your site.
• Channels Report – Because this report gives you the performance of specific channel groups, you will be able to identify the groups that caused the highest bounce rate. Then, you can examine the group and implement strategies to fix what you think is causing a loss of visitor engagement.
• Report all traffic – Provides the bounce rate for each source/average pair.
• All pages report With this report, you can see how your individual pages are performing. So, if you see that only two pages have a high bounce rate, you can assess whether their content resonates with the entire site, or perhaps, there are problems with the page itself such as too many pop-ups, broken images, or messy content .

Reduce bounce rate through anchor scripts

Good information is what most Internet users are looking for. If your site has high-quality and trustworthy content, there is a good chance that guests will stay for a while and explore more. In addition to the quality of the content, ease of site navigation is also vital for visitors.

So how does anchor text affect the user experience and, ultimately, the bounce rate?

curiosity

Anchor texts alone can grab a visitor’s attention because they are different in color from the text around them. With static texts, you can engage your users because they want to know what content they will see once they click on the link.

click

To ensure that visitors do not leave your site, the use of interesting anchor scripts is a must. Suppose you are talking about cars on your page; A basic text such as “car maintenance tips” will be more effective than just using any word that is not relevant to the topic. When the user clicks the link text, a signal will be sent to Analytics, which means that the session will not be marked as bouncing.

Predictability

With anchor scripts, users don’t have to guess what they can see on the other side of the link. Using a clear body will result in what we call a “trust click”.

Therefore, to ensure that visitors do not leave your site immediately, the use of appropriate anchor scripts should be one of your top priorities.

Increase user interaction

Lowering your site’s bounce rate is a doable task if you follow the popular tips from the experts. However, this cannot be done overnight. You will have to spend some time doing this to make sure that you are on the right track. Changing designs or content, reducing and placing popups, and creating a mobile-friendly version of your site are just some of the things you should do to ensure continued user interaction.

Remember that the time people spend on your website is a representation of how they feel about it. If users abandon your site immediately, there may be something wrong with your e-commerce site, and you will have to fix it soon. Single sessions recorded on your website increase your bounce rate, which in turn reduces conversions and ultimately reduces your earnings.