You work hard to attract shoppers to your e-commerce store. One of the last things that you want is to discover is that a high percentage of your website visitors only view a single webpage and then leave. Of course, you’re hoping that shoppers will feel compelled to add an item to the shopping cart, search or browse for products, or otherwise engage with your website. And high bounce rates tell you that something is not right with your website.
Luckily, Magento stores have lots of flexibility, allowing you to optimize your site in a way that will decrease bounce rates with the goal of driving more site visitors to checkout. With that in mind, we’ve put together a comprehensive list of the most common ways to decrease bounce rates.
Speed
Shoppers have no patience or interest in waiting for pages in your website to load. In fact, according to a 2020 study commissioned by Google, a mobile site speed increase of 0.1 seconds led to an 8.4% higher conversion rate.
That’s why you should be testing your Magento loading speeds as well as looking at data, such as Core Web Vitals reporting in your Google Search Console to benchmark your site speeds. Once you know what’s slowing down your site, work with your Magento developers and Magento host to optimize your site speeds. Magento Speed Optimization is crucial for providing a seamless shopping experience and ensuring that your customers stay engaged with your website.
Product prices
Comparison shopping on the internet is fast and relatively painless. If shoppers can quickly and easily identify websites offering comparable goods at a better price, they’re unlikely to stick around for long. One great way to solve this problem is by monitoring competitors and automatically repricing products in your Magento store with a pricing solution.
Errors & compatibility issues
Just because your website loads well for some users some of the time, doesn’t mean that’s a consistent experience for all shoppers. Whether you have coding issues, hosting issues, or compatibility issues with certain web browsers or mobile devices, it’s time for some debugging.
Marketers can often glean issues from Google Analytics and other data tools because they’ll notice high bounce rates for specific user groups. You can also test out your site from a variety of devices and browsers, navigating across different page types, ensuring that the shopping experience is smooth.
Beyond that, your Magento developers can help check error and exception logs, and otherwise conduct a more thorough site audit to confirm that your site is loading well. You can also speak with your host about monitoring services, as some include this at no additional cost. Monitoring will help keep an eye out for intermittent issues, such as if your resource usage spikes causing errors for site visitors.
Usability & accessibility
Errors can be obvious if you know what you’re looking for, but don’t forget to look for usability issues as well. This can be anything from a poorly performing site search box that delivers poor results, to menus that are tough to navigate.
In other situations, usability will come down to accessibility optimization. Remember that shoppers that have visual, auditory, or other impairments, need to shop too!
Non-existent pages
If shoppers are reaching pages in your website that no longer exist, or perhaps never existed due to a typo, they’re likely to leave your site. You can look at reports of 404 errors, such as in Google Search Console, and fix those problems.
Once you know where shoppers are landing, you can create redirects, sending them to the best-possible pages within your site. This gives you a better chance of capturing their interest and getting them into your sales funnel.
Out of stock items
If a shopper arrives at a product page, and that product is out of stock, there’s rarely much for them to do but move on to the next website. With Magento, you can consider enabling In-Stock Allerts, allowing shoppers to sign up to be notified when you’ve replenished your inventory. You can also consider using an extension to offer shoppers the ability to backorder an item, with a clear estimate of when the order will be ready to ship.
In terms of capturing the shopper’s attention, you can consider displaying related products that are in stock, in the hope of attracting shoppers to consider alternative items.
Design appeal
We’ve all walked into a business and been turned off by what we’ve seen. Magento websites should have consistent design elements. That means using consistent colors, fonts, and other style elements, from your logo to buttons and menus within your website.
Similarly, the designs should be appealing. This may sound subjective, because to some extent, it is. However, you can always survey your customers, vendors, or others that you trust to provide honest feedback to understand what others think. Remember that your opinion is valuable, but it’s not a complete barometer as to how shoppers react to your site.
Content
Your theme and design elements are important, but so are the pieces of content within your website. If shoppers land on a page, whether it’s a blog post or a product page, and they’re not drawn in, they’re likely to bounce off of your site.
Consider adding a variety of high-quality images and videos when possible, in addition to unique and digestible written content. You want to help shoppers make a purchase by providing fresh content that helps your store stand out from the crowd. If, for instance, you have the same bland manufacturer’s description and solitary product photo as every other website, you’re not providing anything compelling for shoppers to engage with.
Call to action
Pages within your website should ideally have very clear calls to action. Whether those are Add to Cart buttons or links to other pages on your site, they should be prominent. If they’re lost in a sea of buttons and graphics, for instance, it’s easy for shoppers to move on rather than continue forward through your site.
Inaccurate titles & meta descriptions
If you advertise one thing, but when shoppers get to your website, they find another, you’re asking for people to bounce. Shoppers don’t like bait and switch tactics or having their time wasted. The more accurate your information is, the more likely it is that the people that choose to visit your site will find exactly what they’re looking for and continue forward with the shopping process.
Popups and modals
These can work for or against you. If you get in a shopper’s way with some form of popup, lightbox, or modal, they may leave. This is especially true if it’s hard for shoppers to exit the modal, including on mobile devices. Whether you’re offering shoppers a coupon or trying to collect their email address, be careful to test and measure how these are impacting bounce rates. If, for instance, you serve up these offers or requests indiscriminately or repetitiously, it can be a turnoff, even for long-term customers.
On the flip side, there are ways of showing modals to shoppers that appear to be getting ready to leave your website. This is usually done when shoppers start moving their cursor toward the “x” to close the tab or window. In some cases, this will help you to offer a coupon or take an action that will keep the consumer engaged.
Personalization
If you have a large unwieldy catalog shoppers may be overwhelmed and decide to leave. Some refer to this as analysis paralysis. An alternative is to help personalize your site based upon available data. There are ways to accomplish this with solutions that leverage Artificial Intelligence, but sometimes it’s as simple as providing a short quiz to pair the shopper with the most appropriate product selections.
Trust symbols
Of course, every page in your Magento website needs to be loading securely over HTTPS. However, some shoppers are wary of stores that are unfamiliar. There are a variety of trust symbols that you can consider testing to make consumers more comfortable. That may range from showcasing your store’s 5-star reviews, to calling out organizations that you support, or including security seals from tech companies that shoppers are familiar with.
Features & functionality
Beyond content, layout, calls to action, and trust symbols, you can consider other opportunities to stand out.
Examples include loyalty programs with reward points, free gifts for making a purchase, extended warranty programs, and buy-now-pay-later financing offers.
In essence, if a shopper can purchase the same item from another website at the same price, you need to get creative. Sometimes something as simple as offering a subscription program through which shoppers can have an item auto-ship is all you need to stand out from the crowd.
Traffic sources
Most bot traffic is filtered out in reporting tools like Google Analytics. However, some may slip through, artificially increasing your bounce rates. You can use your Magento firewalling solution to block out some of these bots, but in some cases, you’ll simply need to filter out this artificial traffic out of your analytics reporting.
However, bots aren’t the only sources of high-bounce traffic. Look for trendlines. If you see that a particular traffic source is generating high bounce rates, investigate. If it’s a paid traffic source, such as Google Ads, you should look for underperforming campaigns. You may find that some of your targeting needs to be better adjusted. It’s not unusual for one or multiple traffic sources to weigh down your average bounce rate.
External links
It’s ok to send shoppers to other websites, such as to interact with your store’s social media pages. On the other hand, you don’t want them to completely exit your store. Be sure that the links they’re clicking on your site open up in new tabs or new windows. You want to avoid shoppers being sent off-site prematurely, and not making their way back to finish their journey through your store.
Store information
If a shopper looks at your header and footer, and can’t quickly and easily find information such as your phone number, they may simply bounce off of your website. When given a choice, many shoppers don’t want to do business with a company that they’re going to have a hard time communicating with. Shoppers know that if they have a problem, such as a delayed or missing shipment, they don’t want to be struggling to find support.
While it may sound basic, making it easy to access terms and conditions, shipping policies, privacy policies, and return policies can win or lose a sale for you. Many shoppers may not go looking for these, but those that do will be turned off if they feel like your company isn’t transparent about key information.
While you’re at it, if you’re a business that’s known for offering coupons, consider having a page within your own website that lists special offers or discounts. While this may sound counter-intuitive, it can be better than having shoppers scouring the internet for a working coupon, and getting lost along the way. This is, of course, only important for businesses that frequently offer coupons, and should be rolled out through A/B testing to make sure it’s having the desired outcome for your Magento store.
Proactive communications
In a traditional offline retail setting, if a shopper comes into your store, you greet them and offer them assistance whenever possible. Consider ways to similarly engage with shoppers through your Magento store.
One common way is to integrate a live chat solution, allowing your team members to proactively offer assistance when the time is right, such as when a shopper has been looking at a high-ticket item for a certain amount of time.
Intrusive forms
It can seem great to make shoppers sign up to get access to something. You, of course, want their contact information, which will enable you to stay in touch with them. However, such demands come at a price.
Whenever you require shoppers to sign up or share information before proceeding, you can expect that a percentage will bounce. You can test this to see what the difference is in your specific use case.
Analytics issues
Your high bounce rate may be lower than it appears. While this is rarely the case, if you suspect that your data is inaccurate, you should test your tracking codes. Google Analytics, for instance, provides step-by-step instructions on how to use Google Tag Assistant to verify your setup.
Learn more about bounce rates
While this list may seem long, hopefully, your site is already addressing many of these issues, leaving only a few for you to investigate. When in doubt, considering searching for Magento consultants or developers with expertise in debugging and conversion rate optimization. Don’t forget to check your bounce rates and other metrics on a regular basis to monitor for changes that can impact your sales and revenue.
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