Bounce Rate

[dan pack]

Hi all,

would anyone have an idea what an acceptable bounce rate would be for a B2B site in the supplies and a competitive market place.

Cheers

Steve

 

[fisicx]

It depends on a lot of things but a good site with the right marketing could easily get a bounce rate well under 50%. With a bit of analysis and tweaking you can get this down around 20%.

It's got nothing to do with a competitive market. If you can get them on the site the hard bit is done.

 

[dan pack]

It depends on a lot of things but a good site with the right marketing could easily get a bounce rate well under 50%. With a bit of analysis and tweaking you can get this down around 20%.

It's got nothing to do with a competitive market. If you can get them on the site the hard bit is done.

Thanks again,

At the moment traffic is shall we say light and the rate very high, so we have looked at the site and to be truthful struggled with product pages. There has been hits from adwords/ bing shopping and ads direct to product pages so would you think that this was decent quality traffic ?. The ads use neg keywords etc so hopefully should be of a good quality.

 

[Peter Bowen]

Hi Steve.

I can't tell you about bounce rate because that's not a metric I track for my clients but I can give you conversion rates on Google Ads traffic. We see anywhere between 5 and 40% of paid visitors fill in a contact form to become a sales leads.

Hope this helps.

 

[dan pack]

Hi Steve.

I can't tell you about bounce rate because that's not a metric I track for my clients but I can give you conversion rates on Google Ads traffic. We see anywhere between 5 and 40% of paid visitors fill in a contact form to become a sales leads.

Hope this helps.

Perfect thank you
I will keep that in mind once things settle a little and a picture builds. I know that our budget is not even the tea and biscuit bill for the biggest player in the industry we are in, i nearly fainted when i found out !

 

[fisicx]

At the moment traffic is shall we say light and the rate very high, so we have looked at the site and to be truthful struggled with product pages.

Words and pictures will convince them to stay on the page. Then if the price is right they will buy.

The problem you have is Shopify. You can't do the detailed customisation needed to build great landing pages. I'm not convinced it's a good platform for B2B.

 

[dan pack]

Words and pictures will convince them to stay on the page. Then if the price is right they will buy.

The problem you have is Shopify. You can't do the detailed customisation needed to build great landing pages. I'm not convinced it's a good platform for B2B.

From a person with minimal to zero code skills once set up i think it is easier for a small company like us to use without having to out source and wait for others. It should i would think evolve as a platform and adjust to trends as they happen along with new apps being made available all the time. I do agree though its very B2C focused especially with the current apps and layouts etc. One of the reasons for the change was that it is very user friendly but like i said once set up correctly with tweaks made.

 

[fisicx]

It's not designed for what you want to do. It is as you say a B2C platform. You will become increasing frustrated because you can't add the features you want.

I know you have a tiny budget but you will be spending more and more on a Shopify site that will never be yours. All you are dong is renting the site.

 

[dan pack]

It's not designed for what you want to do. It is as you say a B2C platform. You will become increasing frustrated because you can't add the features you want.

I know you have a tiny budget but you will be spending more and more on a Shopify site that will never be yours. All you are dong is renting the site.

If we reach that stage then i suppose it done its job and we have to move on and up with a larger budget. With the open cart we found it to hard to change perhaps we set off with the wrong person but life is a ongoing lesson as they say.

Having said that i do know of a company hitting nine hundred + orders per week on Shopify, but i accept and take on board what you are saying 100%

 

[Taobao agent]

For a small budget, it is better to spend the budget on marketing ways of high ROI. Of course, the bounce rate will be low. iIt is better to control the bounce rate under 60% for the e commerce site.

 

[iDigLocal]

Thanks again,

At the moment traffic is shall we say light and the rate very high, so we have looked at the site and to be truthful struggled with product pages. There has been hits from adwords/ bing shopping and ads direct to product pages so would you think that this was decent quality traffic ?. The ads use neg keywords etc so hopefully should be of a good quality.

Firstly, you have to be careful just looking at overall bounce rate. There is a lot of referral and direct spam traffic that will give you a false impression of bounce rate as all this traffic will be 100%. So for a better idea look at PPC and organics bounce rate.

The next thing you need to look at is how are people getting to your site, via what keywords and which pages are getting the rankings.

Certainly with adwords it is very easy to pay for a lot of off-target traffic. Your campaigns need to be optimised in order to reduce this.

Next you need to look at your organic rankings to see what you are getting ranked for. You might find you are getting mostly non-convertible traffic.

Conversion tracking is a good idea, if you have not already done this.

And, if you are serious, get a proper website, one that can grow with the business rather than the cms web portals.

 

[fisicx]

Having said that i do know of a company hitting nine hundred + orders per week on Shopify, but i accept and take on board what you are saying 100%

Not suggesting Shopify can't be successful. But a lot of them aren't because it's a one size fits all solution that doesn't fit everybody.

You are better off biting the bullet now and getting a proper website built that you control. Not sure what Shopify package you are using but it's likely your could get a standalone site built for less than you will pay in Shopify fees over the next 2 years.

 

[Paul Murray]

Where are they coming from, which pages are they arriving on and bouncing from? It could be something like your meta description being misleading – what they expect to get from a Google search result isn't what they get when they arrive so they leave.

Consider adding a FAQs page if you don't already. If it's the second page people visit, then you could assume the questions you address there, aren't being addressed on the landing pages.

Also, check you're not tracking your own visits to your site, this can mess up your analytics and give you false positives/negatives.

 

[Inva]

Bounce rate is a useless metric to which i would not pay too much attention. It exists solely for the purpose of marketing people selling you something "You have 60% bounce rate? OMG click here!", or in case they are your employees, to appear as if they're doing data analysis or something "Here's my report, it's full of numbers so i did a lot of work!"

The bounce rate means that either visitors are not interested in your product, or that they didn't like your website visually. Can't do anything about the first and the 2nd is not that hard to fix to an acceptable standard.

You are better off biting the bullet now and getting a proper website built that you control. Not sure what Shopify package you are using but it's likely your could get a standalone site built for less than you will pay in Shopify fees over the next 2 years.

Absolutely agree with this, it's sadly a mistake which a lot of new businesses do, and i believe it relates to poor long term planning.

 

[iDigLocal]

Bounce rate is a useless metric to which i would not pay too much attention. It exists solely for the purpose of marketing people selling you something "You have 60% bounce rate? OMG click here!", or in case they are your employees, to appear as if they're doing data analysis or something "Here's my report, it's full of numbers so i did a lot of work!"

Bounce rate is not completely useless. You have to interpret it with a pinch of salt but it is a guide to how your visitors are engaging with a site. If you have visitors and they are not interested they ;eave straight away. If they are interested then they will look around for what they want.

For instance, in the absence of conversions data in adwords, bounce rate can be a good way to begin to optimise a new campaign.

So yes bounce rate is open to interpretation, but I wouldn't say it is useless.

Also for reports, if bounce rate is identified as a KPI for an seo or ppc campaign then it is obviously sensible to include this in a report. It all depends on what the identified KPI's were in the initial discussion with a client and what the goals of any campaign are.

 

[dan pack]

Bounce rate is a useless metric to which i would not pay too much attention. It exists solely for the purpose of marketing people selling you something "You have 60% bounce rate? OMG click here!", or in case they are your employees, to appear as if they're doing data analysis or something "Here's my report, it's full of numbers so i did a lot of work!"

The bounce rate means that either visitors are not interested in your product, or that they didn't like your website visually. Can't do anything about the first and the 2nd is not that hard to fix to an acceptable standard.


Absolutely agree with this, it's sadly a mistake which a lot of new businesses do, and i believe it relates to poor long term planning.

We have had a stand alone site albeit hosted open cart and found initially it was great, what we found was that as we got more adventurous then you start incurring cost through having someone translate what you want into and onto the website. This leads to time and effort not only money being applied to achieving the goal, throw in times scales dragging on etc it the becomes a pain. When i started with an eCommerce site a few years ago (I stared with a god awful Salmon pink back grounded monstrosity) hosted seemed the easy option, then the way to go was host your own etc. Now looking at what is available and the shift over the years to SAS and cloud hosting this that and the other does it not seem things are swinging back the other way?. All personal opinion from a small business that started with no cash in a bedroom etc etc. As we have grown to now 4 people then a self hosted website can become something that causes you to work on the business (admin and accounts included) and not in the business (earning) if that makes sense or spend more money!, and like most businesses with only 3,4,5, people and a turnover under say 600k then the balance between in and on has to be managed very carefully.

 

[Alan]

If you have visitors and they are not interested they ;eave straight away.

Be careful here -bounce rate is measured in different ways by different analytics products.

Google Analytics measure a bounce as single page visit, and not time on site or any interactions such as scrolling.

If you have big product pages with lots of information, visitors may well be spending time looking at the details, even clicking through on page tabs to look at reviews etc - having got their information leave - to compare prices - and maybe come back and buy. That interaction could easily be measured as a bounce.

As mentioned, for an e-commerce platform there are better metrics to look at, such as conversion rates and abandoned baskets. These tell you more.

 

[Inva]

We have had a stand alone site albeit hosted open cart and found initially it was great, what we found was that as we got more adventurous then you start incurring cost through having someone translate what you want into and onto the website. This leads to time and effort not only money being applied to achieving the goal, throw in times scales dragging on etc it the becomes a pain. When i started with an eCommerce site a few years ago (I stared with a god awful Salmon pink back grounded monstrosity) hosted seemed the easy option, then the way to go was host your own etc. Now looking at what is available and the shift over the years to SAS and cloud hosting this that and the other does it not seem things are swinging back the other way?. All personal opinion from a small business that started with no cash in a bedroom etc etc. As we have grown to now 4 people then a self hosted website can become something that causes you to work on the business (admin and accounts included) and not in the business (earning) if that makes sense or spend more money!, and like most businesses with only 3,4,5, people and a turnover under say 600k then the balance between in and on has to be managed very carefully.

What you had was OpenCart, which is not an in-house solution. So you basically had a generic trading platform which was hosted on your own server. But the hosting is not the issue with platforms, the issue is the platform itself, its inability to fulfill YOUR needs and its inclusion of a thousand features which you DON'T need and are detrimental to performance and security.

Regarding the part in bold, why do you think that is of any importance? What you say is true, but it's the "what". We need to know the "why" to better understand what happens.

TL;DR
5 years down the road you will have paid the same or more money by using a generic platform, while possibly owning nothing

First thing, platforms are standardised and businesses like standard stuff for reasons relating to personnel training. This because most developers are not skilled enough to create a good in-house platform, but they may be able to configure and modify an existing platform if they learn it. Therefore you as a business are more likely to find decent employees when on a generic platform.

That comes at the expense of future expansion/growth/scalability of course, which is what it all boils down to. While most new businesses or even existing ones switch over to SaaS or self-hosted platforms, the real question is: Where will these be 5 years from now?

The majority will have crashed and burned miserably, while the rest who "made it" will be spending top dollar in features, maintenance and fees. Some of these who will make the mistake to keep using SaaS platforms after an initial period, will at some point come to the unpleasant realisation that after thousands of pounds spent, they don't actually own a single line of code of said platform. Also they will find it increasingly difficult to move away.

And then there's the fact that you have no guarantee that your platform of choice will continue to be developed/maintained after X years, leaving you open to the possibility of forced migration or doing heavy customisations (in the best case scenario), which is basically square 1 as you would be doing the same work with an own platform to begin with, minus all the baggage.

 

[Dario.c]

Bounce Rate depends a lot on the industry you are playing in very specific but let's say a natural bounce rate would be around 60% 70%

 

[fisicx]

a B2B website has an average bounce rate of 61%

Blimey! If that was my bounce rate I'd be most miffed.

 

[Dario.c]

Blimey! If that was my bounce rate I'd be most miffed.

Depends a lot on how relevant your landing page is optimised and the design. Sometimes small changes can be a real game changer

 

[xoxoseo]

Agreed with posters above, try to find a benchmark report in the Internet, and compare your bounce rate to the average in your niche.

 

[iDigLocal]

Be careful here -bounce rate is measured in different ways by different analytics products.

Google Analytics measure a bounce as single page visit, and not time on site or any interactions such as scrolling.

If you have big product pages with lots of information, visitors may well be spending time looking at the details, even clicking through on page tabs to look at reviews etc - having got their information leave - to compare prices - and maybe come back and buy. That interaction could easily be measured as a bounce.

As mentioned, for an e-commerce platform there are better metrics to look at, such as conversion rates and abandoned baskets. These tell you more.

We don't deny what you are saying. Our point about bounce rate is that it should not be ignored, it can be useful. It is always dependent on the context and it's interpretation should not be taken in isolation from other metrics.

 

[justinaldridge]

There are a lot of bounce rates being stated here but they mean nothing without knowing the quality of the traffic, the pages users land on, new or returning visitors, mobile or desktop, the keywords, the intent, etc....

Bounce rates are useful metrics but not looked at in isolation.

Have a read of Google's own advice about bounce rates if you want to understand it better.