High Bounce Rate

[ATP]

Hi Mozzers,

I wanted to discuss bounce rates as i am trying to drive my websites down and would appreciate some pointers.

Firstly, the facts.

Ours is an e-commerce website we attract 10000-12000 visitor a month, 8000 of which land on a single page and the other 4000 rest of website.

On a whole the rest of the website has a bounce rate of 48-56% which im fairly comfortable about, but have made small gains with little changes.

The problem is the single page attracting 8000 visitors. The page is an informative article about the various types of a select product and its most common uses. When i started the page had no internal links and was suffering from a 88% bounce rate. I have since inserted products into every sub-section of the post and lots of links to products, category pages etc. This has gone really well and the pages linked from it attracted 1000 more views month 1, and 1500 month 2 with the bounce rate dropping to 76% (small win). However I am still not happy as this is still very high. I would like to work towards dropping it below 60%.

The article attracts traffic from hundreds of longtail keywords around the subject "different types of this product". The average time spent on the page is 4-5 minutes so I know people are reading the article and finding it useful. How else can I look to encourage more click-through?

[Matthew_Edgar]

Why don't you sell those products? Is it because those other products are inferior in quality, too expensive for value, etc.? If there are specific reasons like that, it can some times be helpful to state that specifically as a means of helping to educate your customers and potentially sway them into seeing the value of what you do sell.

The other thing to look at is what keywords are driving traffic to the page. Granted, this data is hard to get but you can get a good sense of this in Search Console. Figure out why you are ranking for the things you don't sell. For example, if you have a lot of links pointing to you referring people your way referencing something you don't carry, see if there is a way to change those links to something more specific

Alternatively, if you are getting enough people coming to the site interested in products you don't carry but there isn't a great reason your company doesn't carry them, maybe see if there is a way you can carry the products (or resell them or something like that). I've worked with more than one client who didn't realize so many people may be interested in Product X until they saw the search traffic and that traffic helped them decide to change products offered.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I suspect part of the problem isn't that you are getting traffic, but the wrong sort of traffic. You want to sell products, but you might just be getting a causal searcher who gathers the information they want and then move on.

Have you looked into the key phrases you are targeting? You might also want to consider writing another information-rich page that can be linked from within the content but that is very targeted to the page your visitors are on.

There are a number of questions need answering about the page:

• Who are your ideal visitors?
• What are they arriving for?
• What can they do once they have the information they need?

Do look at Feeback Army (linked above) because for not very much money, you can get live users interacting with your page and answering questions you might have.

-Andy

[ATP]

Some nice feedback there Matthew, Thank you. I certainly think this could be something i should look more into.

There a certain types of this product we dont cover in the article. Simply because we dont sell them. I know this could account for a number of the bounces simply because of the search terms users enter from this page.

How would you reduce the bounce rate for the attracted traffic and expectation of those products you dont sell?

[ATP]

The page in question is

http://www.atp-instrumentation.co.uk/different-types-of-thermometer/

Allow me to add some more context.

The site is going under a content review, as I found many page of thin or poor content when i began. This page will also be updated in-line with new categories and better content that is being injected into those new pages.

When i began in March / April the page wasn't great, but attracted so many visitors I was reluctant to alter it too much. I added the product images, and links into the already existing sub-sections.

The content can be improved upon, but as the average person spend 4-5 minutes reading im fairly sure the content is ok for now.

[Matthew_Edgar]

Without looking at the site or this one page, but based on what you are describing, I would suspect the bounce rate is high because of an expectation gap. The people coming to this article sound like they are in the early stages of the buying cycle--they want information about the types of products available and how to use this product. Maybe many of these people aren't quite ready to look at category pages or product pages because it is simply too early in the buying cycle for that to happen. Your links expect one thing (products/shop/buy) but visitors expect another (more info).

In these cases to lower the bounce rate, you need some kind of in-between content. Something that moves people to the next step of the buying cycle. Basically, you need to solve for X in this equation: early pre-purchase research -> X -> product page. To start solving for X, I want to know what questions people have after reading this article. There are several ways to get that, but user testing with targeted customers can usually be a good place to start.

Another place to look is in regards to trust factors. Do the people coming to that informational article trust your brand? It seems like they are because of how long they spend on the page. However, it could be people trust the company enough for information and insight, but maybe not enough to purchase. Again, user testing this page to gauge trust factors could be helpful to clarify what more you can do here to get people to stick around.

Final thought - it may simply be that this page will always have a high bounce rate. This is where re-targeting ads can be helpful. You know people are interested in your proudct but aren't quite ready to look at products just yet. So, after they visit this page you should re-target an ad to them as they continue their research building up to purchasing the product.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

What I would do is focus on writing content that serves the users search intent. From there, focus on the logical next step that provides a useful and engaging experience for the user. Always think top down for your audience.

• What is the user's intent with their search?
• Does my business goals align with the audience goals?
• What do I need to make sure that intent is met on my site?
• What title tags need to be in place?
• What does my meta description need to say to increase CTR?
• What internal links do I need that are logical in my content if the user is interested?
• What calls to action do I need to ensure the user either a. keeps moving through the site or b. converts if that's the ultimate goal?
• How do I distribute this content in a way that my target audience finds it?

What I suggest doing is going through these questions step by step and find potential pain points. You can even try user testing to get an idea of how users are using your site; this can also be done using Hotjar, both from a recording and survey standpoint. You could even try interviewing your customers to see if the site is providing the information they need, or if they know what the next step is.

There are a ton of opportunities and resources to help you find out how to keep users on and moving through your site. I would focus on all of the questions and resources above. Then, sit down with your team and discuss priority areas.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[Shawn_Huber]

I think you are on the right track of including links to the products. Maybe try to refine that similar to what Amazon does, "People who view this also view ______".

I also wonder if you have multiple long tail queries, any chance/thought into creating more pages to make them more specific to what the searcher is interested in? Meaning if they are looking for product X, and this one page is talking about products A-Z, it may be too much non-relevant content for them so they bounce out. This could explain the time on page being high and the bounce rate as well. Just a thought without knowing what the page looks like.

[T0BY]

Hello!  Do you have a few strategically placed, non-spammy calls to action?

[RSedrati]

Can you give a link to the page please?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Have you had a look at what others in your market are doing? You could always look at using CrazyEgg to do some in-page analysis and see how users are browsing the page. It helps to know how far someone is getting down the page and by using the heatmap, you can see where clicks are happening. Find active areas and set a call-to-action around there.

A little live user analysis might also prove useful by understanding what people may / may not like about what is in place. Feedback Army is great for this.

Enticing internal links can also help with funnelling traffic.

-Andy