Reduce your bounce rate and profit twice over
Every online retailer has an interest in making sure that he doesn’t immediately lose the visitors he has acquired. The key to success here is bounce rate reduction. What’s more, since the infamous Google Panda update, if not before, one thing has become clear: a web page’s bounce rate is a Google ranking factor. These are 2 good reasons, then, to optimise your shop.
Reducing the bounce rate in your shop
The bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors to a web page who only call up the page once. Further definition says that bounce visitors include those whose visits last between 5 and 10 seconds. A further assumption is that Google doesn’t consider a visit longer than 30 seconds to be a bouncer, even if only one page is called up.
This quickly leads to the conclusion that significantly reducing the bounce rate in a shop is of both direct and indirect benefit:
- Every visitor who doesn’t bounce stays in the shop and will therefore probably end up as a customer.
- A low bounce rate has a positive effect on Google rankings and ensures that more visitors get to the shop.
Product detail pages are often the most important entry pages – and their bounce rate is also mostly very high. But how can you permanently and noticeably reduce the bounce rate?
An initial approach is the optimisation of product images and descriptions: to this end, it is helpful to use high-resolution and strong product images. A video is also likely to keep customers on your website. The product detail page will be rounded off to perfection by a strong product description and, where possible, seller ratings.
There are 3 further approaches which can help reduce the bounce rate:
- Making trust elements visible
The prominent inclusion of the Trusted Shops Trustmark on the product detail page, along with information on secure payment via SSL encryption, will quickly give the visitor the impression that he has found a trustworthy provider. The probability that he will bounce will fall significantly.
- Get into dialogue with the visitor
It makes sense to get into dialogue with the visitor and give direct answers to frequently asked questions. These might be questions on item delivery or payment options. To this end, it is necessary to assess customer feedback and address the most frequent questions and areas of uncertainty.
- Provide access to similar products
You can easily keep customers on your site, especially in the orientation phase, by making it easy to access further, similar products. These might be other variants of the product, similar products in the same price segment or products purchased by people who have bought this product in the past.
Conclusions to be drawn
There are some measures which can be used to influence bounce rate and, in the best-case scenario, to significantly reduce it. The positive aspects are obvious, and, since Google’s last change of algorithm, it has made increasing sense to make an effort to bring about a low bounce rate in an online shop. There are no concrete instructions on what to do here, which is why testing out the various options is an important requirement when it comes to bounce rate reduction.
