Bounce Rates can be intimidating and downright frightening for many website owners. But, in this blog post, we’re going to demystify the lovely Bounce Rate.
We’re going to take a long hard look at eCommerce industry stats on bounce rates. And, we’re going to give you some tips on how to deal with them.
First, let’s define Bounce Rate using Google’s definition:
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).
There are a number of factors that contribute to a high bounce rate. For example, users might leave your site from the entrance page if there are site design or usability issues. Alternatively, users might also leave the site after viewing a single page if they’ve found the information they need on that one page, and they had no need or interest in going to other pages.
In less vague terms, Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors that go to only one page before leaving your site.
Additionally intimidating about the Bounce Rate is that it’s so important to determining the quality of your page.
What Constitutes a Bounce?
Your website visitor bounces if:
- They leave the site by clicking an external link on your web page.
- They press their browser back button.
- They type in another URL into the web browser.
- They close the browser window or tab.
- They don’t interact with your web page for a long time (usually 30 minutes). This is called a session time-out.
- They landed on your site accidentally and leave quickly.
- They don’t understand your navigation, or it is complicated, and they leave.
- The site is slow loading and they leave.
- They find no call to action, and they depart without taking an action.
Why Does Bounce Rate Matter?
For starters, it shows you how successful you’ve been at meeting your website visitor’s needs. Let’s take a look at this scenario:
You own a restaurant. New customers walk in, take a look at your menu, look around, and then they promptly walk out. They’ve technically “bounced” away from your restaurant. Not the ideal scenario, right? After this, you’d take an objective look at what was so off-putting to them and change it.
The same can be said for your website. Your bounce rate tells you how useful, welcoming and easy-to-navigate your site is, and how relevant your products are.
If your visitor landed on your home-page and promptly bounced off, it would be safe to assume they didn’t find anything useful, and in fact, they might not have liked what they saw.
But, what about the visitor who landed on the landing page you directed them to and then bounced off. You might say that is an acceptable bounce. They did what you wanted, got the info you expected them to get and took the action you desired.
What is the Average eCommerce Bounce Rate?
In a recent post, we gathered some industry averages on Bounce Rates. This is what we found for industry averages:
- Minimum Bounce Rate – 14.3%
- Maximum Bounce Rate – 68%
- Average Bounce Rate – 33.9%
Small eCommerce Industry Stats for Bounce Rates
We’ve gone a step further and separated our stats into small eCommerce sites and large ones because one study found a significant difference in stats. They compared stats of the small players and the big ones.
The study used the Alexa ranking to determine the small and large players. This ranking has to do with the amount of traffic a site gets. The small players fell between 10,000 and 100,000. The large players were the top 10,000 eCommerce websites. Here are the stats for small eCommerce sites:
- Bounce rate: 34%
- Active time on site: 12.5%
- Time spent on site: 200 seconds
Large eCommerce Industry Stats for Bounce Rates
In comparison, the large eCommerce sites do better:
- Bounce rate: 9.4%
- Active time on site: 34%
- Time spent on site: 70 seconds (This at first glance looks worse, but it is actually better as it means customers found what they were looking for faster.)
What Do these Stats Mean?
First, the bigger sites have a higher number of returning visitors. This leads to low bounce rates and less time spent on the site because they know what they are looking for.
Second, they work hard at optimization – every day. The optimize, test, optimize, test and repeat.
The Take-Away
As an eCommerce site owner, it’s important to really know what your Bounce Rates mean. While it’s great to know your site’s overall rate, you’ll want to delve further into your stats and look at Bounce Rates for individual pages as well.
For example, you just sent an email to all of your registered users advertising a huge sale on a Fourth of July T-Shirt. Your email was highly successful and had a great open rate. As a result, you sold out of the shirts. Yet, when you look at your Bounce Rate for the T-Shirt landing page, you found it to be exorbitantly large.
Is this bad? No. Why not? Because you sent your visitors to buy the shirt, and they did.
Can it be improved? Probably. How? By adding a call to action to purchase another item they might like.
Lastly, if you are a small eCommerce site owner, and you want to remain competitive and compete with the big fish, you need to pay attention to the following factors:
- Lead generation
- Content marketing
- Inbound marketing strategies
- Contact nurturing
Instead of focusing on everyone else’s bounce rate, you should focus on improving your bounce rate in comparison to your own historical bounce rates. Pay constant attention to the Bounce Rates and find ways to improve them.
After reading this article, do you feel like your Bounce Rates are too high? Are you having trouble figuring out why? If you’re ready for some help with your site’s overall and individual page bounce rates, we are here to help. We will decipher your Bounce Rate reports and fix any website problems. We’ll help you change your site and its landing pages for your ultimate success. What’s more, we guarantee results!
Contact us today to fix your Bounce Rate issues!
Image: GotCredit
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