Bounce Rates and Your Home Page

If you are amongst the group of website owners (or webmasters) who use Google Analytics (or another analytic tool) one of the first things you will be looking at is the 'Bounce Rate' (the number of visitors that come to the site and leave straight away, think about it in the same way as a shopper going through the door of a store and then turning right around and leaving without looking at what was on the shelves - not something that would fill the owner with confidence if it happened a lot !).

This Bounce rate is probably the most important statistic there is as a high bounce rate means that people are just not getting the chance to see what you can do for them, which means you have lost a potential sale 'EVERY TIME someone Bounces'.

Now don't get me wrong NO site has a zero bounce rate, and the rate will vary tremendously depending on how the visitor got to the site (e.g emails sent to a list of qualified customers will (should) always result in lower bounce rates than visitors from the Search Engine results), but if you have a high bounce rate then you are in trouble, that's a fact.

So how can you improve matters?

The first thing I would do is to check the download time of your site and see if it is this that is causing you issues (these days people will often leave sites that take too long to download). Tip, if you want to be really clever you can also make changes to your home page to see if it is downloaded in full every time, quite useful to know if you are having doubts on the matter. You could also see if users with particular browser are leaving more than others (here a sign of incompatibility with the browser).

However, once you have checked all these 'technical' issues, the next step is to ask yourself three questions:-

Does your Home Page

1. Tell Visitors WHO YOU ARE?
2. Tell Visitors WHAT YOU OFFER / DO?
3. Tell Visitors WHY THEY SHOULD BUY FROM YOU?

If your site does not do these three things correctly it could well be the reason your visitors are leaving, without looking around the store, in high numbers.

So go check it out, just off to have another look at mine now too....

More tomorrow

PS If you have not got analytics of some sort on your site, get it sorted now! You are really missing a trick as you simply won't be able to tell what the important people - your potential customers - think about your site and how they are reacting to it.