10 Reasons people leave your site (resulting in a high bounce rate)

First of all, what is bounce rate?
When you look at the google analytics (statistics) of your website, on the main dashboard you’ll see your bounce rate. This rate indicates the number of visitors that only look at one page of your website and then leave. Unless you have a lot of people looking at one page (such as I have with the weekly marketing tip), you can assume that your website visitors haven’t found what they were looking for. If you pay for google adwords, which can be quite expensive, you want to make sure that the people that click on your ad are not one page visitors and a bounce rate statistic. If they are, you are wasting your money and need to review your ad. 

But even if you don’t pay for ads, you want to ensure you get quality traffic and keep them on your site.

The aim is to keep your bounce rate under 40%. If you can get it under 30%, you’re doing extremely well! If you can keep people on your website longer, you have a higher chance to convert them to a sale or a booking.

Here are a few reasons people leave your website:

1. Poor webpage design (use of poor contrast: like dark background with coloured text, too much happening on the page)
2. Poor Navigation (such as too many navigation buttons – around 6-8 maximum works best)
3. Not using a responsive layout. So landing pages become hard to read on devices with different screen resolutions.
4. Too much text and sentences that are too long. If you are selling multiple products, only put three on your homepage. It’s easier to make a choice.
5. Not enough images and no video. A photo or video can showcase what you sell much easier than blocks or text – and it’s much easier on the eye!
6. Moving google ads – this can be very distracting.
7. No links in the text to other pages to find out more.
8. Little to no spacing between lines and paragraphs and lack of headings and sub-headings. Your headline and first paragraph must highlight the benefit of reading any further.
9. Landing pages which are slow to download. This is a major put-off for visitors to your site.
10. Noisy sites: Audio/video contents which auto play as soon as the page loads. This is very annoying for visitors. (I personally can’t stand this!)

So, set a goal to improve your bounce rate by improving your website.

Till next week, Marijke