One of the most difficult things about online success is just getting people to your website. Unlike a classic baseball movie, "If you build it, they will not come".
It isn't enough to just have a great looking site with good features. You need to promote it through social networks, blogs, advertising, contests, and pr. That's a lot of time consuming and costly work, so when people do find time in their busy day to visit your site, make sure to treat 'em right!
Bounce rate is one of the most important and easiest to understand metrics in Google Analytics. When people bounce from your site, they don't do anything before they leave. Not a single click. As Avinash puts it, the credo of people who bounce from your site is "I came, I puked, I left." It's really that awful -- let's take a look at an actual visitor that wanted to become a customer:
It's really not good. It could have been our headline just didn't appeal to this guy, or that our pricing was too high, or that our site didn't work in his browser. Reducing your bounce rate can take a lot of detective work, but the results are worth it. It's common for websites to have bounce rates over 50% (do you know what yours is?). With a 50% bounce rate, half of all your visitors are leaving your website before you even have a fighting chance to convert them into a customer! All that hard work promoting, developing features, and designing content is wasted if most of your visitors are leaving on the first page.
Discovering your bounce rate is easy. Just log into Google Analytics and you'll see it as soon as you click to your reports.
To really see the value in reducing bounce rate, we need to do a little math. Don't worry -- it's painless! If you have a moment, pull up your Google Analytics or web analytics account and follow along by substituting your own numbers.
- 1,000 visits/day (right on your dashboard)
- 65% bounce rate (also on your dashboard)
- $75 average order value (ecommerce reports, but maybe it should be on your dashboard)
- 5% conversion rate (in ecommerce reports as well)
So from this data, we're seeing online revenue of $3,750 per day. Some quick multiplication:
Visits X conversion rate X average order value = revenue
But out of our 1,000 visits, we're really only seeing 350 visits that have a real chance to buy our product! If we cut our bounce rate in half, to 32.5%, we now have 675 selling opportunities. All other things being equal, we just doubled our revenue! It's not always this cut and dried -- maybe you reduced pricing to appeal to a wider customer base. Your average order values might go down 20%, but that's still worth doubling your sales if you have the margin for it! In our example, by reducing bounce rate we've made our company an additional $112,500 revenue per month! That's over a million dollars per year - your board members will love you!
Ok, it's not always easy to reduce bounce rate. If everyone could cut their bounce rate in half with a day or two of work, everyone would. So how do we achieve this web analytics wizardry? The short and sweet is that we want as many as visitors as we can to look like this when they hit our landing page:
How do we get everyone looking like that? Well a great product and a great service are always helpful. But even if you have the best service, product, and pricing in the world, you have to communicate that in a way your visitors will understand quickly and easily. Most web visitors who aren't familiar with your company will only give your site a few seconds, and studies have shown that first impressions made in as little as two seconds color the entire engagement process! Discovering how to communicate effectively is a fun and rewarding process that benefits greatly from multivariate testing, surveys, usability studies, and other techniques. Stay tuned to our daily tips for more information!