When it comes to marketing an eCommerce website, the analytics of your website is your most important tool for business growth. Looking at, interpreting and then actioning on the information you find through the various analytics platforms attached to your website is vital when looking to improve your website.
We regularly look at Google Analytics metrics such as conversion rates and click-through rates to assess the quality of our client’s websites. A high conversion rate and high rate of traffic or clicks per page indicate that your pages are working as they should and delivering results. However, the question we want to answer in this blog post is how important is bounce rate as a metric for your website’s success? Traffic volume and conversion rates are often talked about, but what about the bounce rate?
So what is bounce rate? Bounce rate is the number of visitors who leave your website after only viewing one page, which is then shown as a percentage. That means, the number of users who entered your website on a specific page and immediately exited, without reading any more information or proceeding to the basket and purchasing.
So if you think about it, bounce rate is arguably one of the most important metrics to look at when you are looking at improving the success of your website. Bounce rate also allows you to check the pages of your website that are designed to capture traffic of people high up the sales funnel, the people that are just looking for information. Without checking bounce rate, it’s difficult to know how well your pages are performing. A particular page could have a really good conversion rate however if the bounce rate is high maybe you are missing out on a HUGE number of sales.
A high bounce rate on a page can tell us a lot. The visitors are leaving that page because the page isn’t fulfilling their needs. The first thing to look at is the content. Is your content relevant to your page title? Does your page match the keywords that it’s being found for in Google, or the keywords you are using in Google Ads? You can use Google Analytics to determine which keywords led to which pages and work our which channel or keyword is giving a high bounce rate.
Also, take a look at the design of the page:
- Does it look good?
- Do you have a good call to action?
- Can you view a heatmap to see how people are using the page?
- Do you feel the page is trustworthy?
Bounce rate tells us whether or not a page serves its purpose. The lower the bounce rate, the more effective a page is.
Conclusion
If you’re currently focusing on increasing traffic and conversion rate optimisation, checking the bounce rate of your website is very important. Reducing bounce rates will help you see an increase in sales. So, is bounce rate an important metric? The simple answer is, yes.
If you need help generating more traffic to your website the first step is to sign up for our FREE Website & Marketing Audit we can look at your website and provide you with actionable insights you can use to improve your website and grow your business..
