How to Win Buyers and Influence Sales With Good Bounce Rate of E-commerce Website

Bounce rate is an interesting metric provided by various analytics programs. But the most popular one is Google Analytics. Well, Google Analytics provides in-depth analysis of your website traffic. You will get all the necessary data that you need to run a successful marketing campaign. 

When it comes to E-commerce website, it is key performance indicators which are known as KPI that E-commerce website can use to monitor traffic on the website. so, before taking deep dive into good or average bounce rate that leads you to get more profitable customers or sales, first you need to understand what is bounce rate.

What is Bounce Rate?

When a user lands on a landing page of your website and exits without any interaction which is called bounce rate. Like if last month 1000 users landed on your E-commerce website and 500 users left without even a single click or interaction then the bounce rate would be 50%. You can simplify this by a simple equation;

500/1000*100 = 50%

As per Google’s definition of bounce rate;

“A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.”

There are so many factors that affect bounce rate of your E-commerce website but before that, you should know the reason why we are discussing this topic.

Why bounce rate matters for any business or E-commerce website?

For this question, I have a better example. Like If you are a bookstore owner and when any customer comes to your store, take a look at the tables and different sections of your store and exits the store. After seeing this situation, you can simply assume that he didn’t like your store. It may be interior design, the collection of the books or whatever. Or he didn’t find what he was looking for. So, there are many possibilities.

For every business, the main key point is to provide best services or user experience in exchange for some charges your customers are paying. So, my point is, he left your store for many reasons and all reasons you should consider and that helps you to improve your services or user experience and this will help you to win more buyers and influence sales.

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Now, think about the same scenario on your E-commerce website. Well, he lands on any product page and without any interaction he left your store. So, there many possibilities, your website may take a while to load or your website may not be responsive. Or if he comes from any email marketing or ad campaign then it may be not relevant to him. So, there are many possibilities. Your 1st and main intention are to provide best user experience to your users or customers. Because if you lose your customers then you will lose your business too. So, from both these cases, we can conclude that bounce rate matters for any business or E-commerce website.

Why E-commerce website’s bounce rate is different compared to other websites?

Let me take one example, If you have 2 websites, 1st is a blog and another is E-commerce website. Now, when you compare both websites’ bounce rate then you will see there is a major difference between both of them.

Because the blog is a website that has some “informative articles” and when a user lands on it, he will start reading. If he is a good reader then he will take approx 4-5 mins to read. And if he will get what he wanted then he will exit. He will not move further. So, the bounce rate of blogs are very high but average session duration is increase which is good for any blog.

But that is not how things work for an E-commerce website. The scenario is completely different when it comes to E-commerce website. Because here the main concern is select the product – add to cart – checkout and done! He will do nothing more than this. When he will be selecting the product from a huge list than he have to visit more than one page. And If he doesn’t like any product, he will exit. So, high bounce rate is very dangerous for an E-commerce website.

What is a good bounce rate for an E-commerce website?

You can’t just say for every website which has 70% bounce rate is bad and 30% bounce rate is good. But when it comes to E-commerce website only, we can say that 66% or more bounce rate is not good. If your website has more than 66% bounce rate then you should troubleshoot and check why bounce rate is too high. And below 30% bounce rate is good for an E-commerce website.

Image Credit: https://conversionxl.com

As per Conversion Voodoo’s report,

• Minimum Bounce Rate – 14.3%
• Maximum Bounce Rate – 68%
• Average Bounce Rate – 33.9%

Reasons for high bounce rate?

As I said earlier, there are so many reasons for high bounce rate and some common of them are given below;

• No in-depth content or incomplete content
• There is not engaging content/boring content
• No call-to-action like social sharing or comments
• The website takes too long to load
• The website is not mobile responsive
• Website/theme design
• Complex site navigation
• Too many advertisements
• irrelevant referral medium
• Accidentally close a browser window/tab
• Accidentally lands on your website
• Any website with a large percentage of mobile traffic has higher bounce rate!

Why is mobile bounce rate higher compared to other devices?

I’m sure, you wouldn’t understand the last reason. Don’t worry, I’ll explain it in this portion. You should also consider bounce rate of the mobile device. As per Google’s report, 60% of online searches from mobile devices. So, people are now spending most of the time on their smartphones. So, it can’t be ignored. Please follow the given graph; it is clearly mentioned that avg. bounce rate is high in mobile device compared to tablet and pc.

Image Credit: http://www.gorocketfuel.com

From this graph, you can conclude that any website with a large percentage of mobile traffic has higher bounce rate. Let’s focus on why traffic comes from mobile devices have high bounce rate.

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I figured out 3-4 common reasons for higher bounce rate in mobile devices;

• website loads slow on mobile
• The website is not properly optimized for mobile devices
• A user may use slow internet connection
• Poor content

How can you improve bounce rate of your E-commerce website?

If your website has high bounce rate then your target must be consistently lowering the bounce rate. Because it provides your customers better user experience and that gives you more sales. You can start it by checking the technical factors like website loads up speed, mobile responsiveness etc. After that, you should focus on your marketing campaigns and it includes ad campaigns and email marketing campaigns. Re-check the links that you give at call-to-action button. And make sure those links should be relevant to your marketing campaigns.

The most important factor for any business is content. It should be effective, informative, actionable, valuable, relevant & consistent which attracts more sales and leads. Once you will give your customers what they want then they also love to stay on your website and buy your products. And automatically bounce rate will reduce. So, you should create content marketing strategy that gives you more leads and sales.

So, I think there is no standard for bounce rate like higher limit and lower limit and even Google doesn’t give this. Your 1st and main target must be  lowering bounce rate and that gives you what you wanted, more buyers and influence sales from your E-commerce site.