Website bounce rates are rising. What should you do?

Increasing proportions of users are leaving websites on the page they land on (known as the bounce rate). We explain what’s happening and what businesses can do to slash bounce rates.

What's happening?

• Although internet usage has grown rapidly, consumers are spending less time on each website they visit and a lower proportion of prospects are converting to customers
• The buying decision time is considerably shorter and more brutal than in the past
• Stats show that significantly more users exit websites on landing pages than any other
• Your landing pages make or break deals

What we recommend businesses do

Make a good first impression

• Research shows that users judge a business by its website in as little as 50 milliseconds (Lindgaard, Carleton University, Ontario)
• The visual look and feel, and perception of depth or clarity on landing pages is critical to whether a user will do business with you
• Consider using visuals or animation to quickly capture an emotional response, but only if they are fast loading and don’t hold up access to other information or links on the page
• Aqueduct recently enabled Enjoy England to reduce the bounce rate on their homepage from 32% to 19% in the first month following visual and usability changes – equivalent to annualised retention of 600,000 unique visitors

Be aware that users don’t always land on your homepage

• Google searches, ads, related site links and email links often land users on different pages or campaign microsites
• Make sure that all landing pages perform as well as the homepage in presenting information, links and calls to action – don’t trap users to a dead end or make it easy to exit rather than buy or explore further; provide access to everything without being cluttered
• Aqueduct have recently advised Laureate, a provider of online masters degrees, on optimising their ‘splash’ pages – a subset of their main website to attract prospects who follow certain PPC ads

Make landing pages personally relevant to each user

• Make sure that users do land on the relevant page – don’t always link to the homepage from emails, ads or third party sites if there’s a specific part of the site that users are expecting or will more directly meet their needs
• Appeal to different user segments – recognise that there are many types of users going to your website for different reasons (such as prospects, existing customers, investors and media). Group relevant links or information together and signpost adequately for different user segments
• Use personalisation to target what you put on landing pages specifically to each user – set cookies to pre-empt needs for future visits; pass campaign type with ad links; pass user information with email links
• Aqueduct has recently re-engineered the website for ICAP, a FTSE 100 financial services company. Landing pages now better appeal to different user segments and balance content and links with a simple uncluttered interface.

Monitor and act on your landing page stats

• Use Google Analytics and more comprehensive tools (such as Crazyegg’s heatmaps) to analyse the bounce rate, number of pages per visit and how users are exploring landing pages
• If your bounce rate is higher than 40%, and average pages per visit is less than 3, it’s a sign that people aren’t staying – make some changes to your landing pages!
• Google’s Website Optimizer is a great way to implement and track refinements to your landing pages
• Beware the ‘Google Bounce Factor’ – if your bounce rate is 60% or more, it could also negatively affect your Google ranking
• Check that a high bounce rate is not down to simply ‘exiting’ to one of your other services (e.g. a secure login environment)