High Bounce Rate - Any ideas?

[Stampy]

Hi

The site in my sig is experiencing a high bounce rate - it's actually risen steadily over the past month or so. I thought it was to do with page load times, and made some changes to this, but bounce rate is still high.

The site actually converts ok, but it means that the people who don't leave immediately must buy something 100% of the time! So it follows that I reduce the bounce rate I make more sales.

The bounce rate is being experienced on targetted keywords (ie ones I've optimised the site for, so I don't think it's down to the wrong traffic). It's just got past the stage where I can be objective about it.

I'm on page 2 of Google for a few of my targetted keywords, so want to get the site performing when I make the push onto the front page.

Any ideas?

 

[betausers]

I do see a few usability problems on the site. For starters, your call-to-action ¨Take a look on the left ...¨ does not appeal enough, and visibility isn´t given enough to items that need it. The search button is also nearly invisible, blended in with the upper graphic and not traditionally where it should be as most ecommerce sites have it, so it could be a case where people are dropping out because they cannot search. Are people reaching your Search?

 

[fisicx]

Is it on all pages or just some pages? Where are your visitors coming from?

You need to look at your bounce rate in combination with other factors.

 

[quikshop]

You need to look at your bounce rate in combination with other factors.

Agreed, we've got a highly visible shop with a bounce rate of just over 60% which is massive, but when you strip out all those coming via Google Images and other non-shopping sources, the bounce rate is closer to 40%.

Do you have Google Analytics or similar? Without a good stats package you can't really get a feel for why people are leaving.

A good idea is to go through each page and work to reduce the bounce rate on each one, sometimes it could be something as daft as a particular page being found for a completely obscure and unrelated search term... one of our pages has a bounce rate of over 90% :0

 

[Roj]

Hi Stampy,

The first thing I noticed about your website was the amount of untidy text in the centre column in the middle of the screen. The centered upper case bullet points some with hyper links are a bit confusing.
You have a "New Product Alert" so an image of this would be good. The featured products section you need to scroll down to which may be better further up the page.
I think by simply rearranging the home page you will improve the bounce rate. Do some split testing and use Analytics and I sure you can improve it.

 

[Stampy]

Thanks for all the feedback so far.

Dave & fisicx - almost all the visitors are arriving on the Homepage - I'm tracking with google analytics so I know that the keywords that they are arriving on are relevant. As I'm building links and content then I would expect other pages to start ranking and perhaps give more relevant content (eg landing straight onto the Solar Phone Charger page).

So the visitors are arriving organically through google search to the Homepage - bounce rate about 70% at the moment!

Some good points Rog and betausers - I'm not that happy about the way the text looks in the middle, but was struggling to be objective enough to know why! I'll try and come up with something for that area, that includes a stronger call to action.

Thanks again. Any additional observations also welcome![FONT=verdana,geneva,lucida,arial][/FONT]

 

[RoseRover]

Hi Stampy,

You've just answered my question which was which page do most searches take you to?

I think your product pages are good as they have the images but your homepage is very dry and wordy. It's amazing what a few good images can do to draw people in as they will then click on them to get through to other pages. Lotso of text is a turn off as nobody has the patience to read it. Think through your key messages, highlight in short phrases and illustrate using pictures.

Take a look at other sites for inspiration!

Hope this helps.

Rose

 

[Stampy]

Thanks Rose. I think you're probably right. It's just finding the balance between getting a call to action and having the images displayed I guess. I'll try a couple of different options and monitor the impact on the bounce rate.