Your website is a marketing tool.
The purpose of that marketing tool is to get your website visitor to take certain actions in line with your marketing plan, with of course will have the end result of making your business profitable.
Bounce rate is one of the biggest obstacles in the way of your website’s conversion rate.
Read on to find out how to lower your bounce rate and boost your conversion…
What is conversion rate?
First of all, let’s have a look at what conversion rate actually is.
The exact action you are looking at getting from your website visitors, will vary depending on the role of the website in your marketing plan. For instance, every time when someone calls you because they found your website online, when someone buys something in your e-commerce store, reads your blog post, requests your free report etc… Depending on the kind of your business and purpose of your website, any number of goals can be counted as conversion.
In general, any action your website motivates your visitors to do, which moves them in the direction of turning them into (fill in the blank_____, for instance, clients, readers, customers, etc), is conversion.
Conversion is essential to make your investment in your new website worthwhile.
The conversion Rate is a measurement how successful your website is. If you set up Google analytics and track your visitors with a local analytics segment, you can figure out what your conversion rate is, especially when combined with your offline tracking of where your clients found you.
How good your conversion rate is, is based on several elements, including the bounce rate.
What is “bouncing”?
The truth is that even the best websites cannot satisfy everyone’s taste. Those who don’t like what your website have to offer will leave your website fairly quickly, and go to explore next website on the Google list. This process of taking a look at a website and then going back to Google, is called “Bouncing”. Your website’s bounce rate is ratio of visitors who likes what your website have to offer and those who don’t.
Average bounce rates for a website will be higher than effective bounce rate. For instance, if you provide a local carpet cleaning service, you are targeting local visitors to your website. If 50% of the visitors to your website are from other countries, you can be pretty sure that for the sake of your marketing, their bouncing or not bouncing, makes no difference to your bottom line profit.
Your effective bounce rate is when you look at Google analytics at your local visitor level. This bounce rate will vary for various businesses, however if you can get your bounce rate lowered down to 30-35%, you’re doing good.
Now the question is, how do you control your bounce rate?
First Impressions can make or break the conversion deal…
The average visitor needs about 5 to 7 seconds to decide do they want spend more time on your website or not. Since no one can really absorb content of the website in those 5 to 7 seconds, it feels like your website never had a fair chance. You just might have the most amazing marketing material on the planet, but if it is not presented on right way, visitor will bounce and you will loose a chance to convert.
Things that will influence visitors impression of your website in those 5 to 7 second are called signals, everything else is called noise. Signal can be positive or negative and noise, as long as it is not covering signals, will not have major influence on visitor’s decision.
Many design companies, (especially places whose advertising campaign revolves around a “websites for less” idea) will fall prey to building websites that are “ok” but will not make much of an impact on the viewer.
However a top quality design that captivates a visitor at first glance, and slows them down enough to make them read the content, can give your content the chance to work, to convert the visitor.
Cutting the bounce rate
Web Design, properly done, is the process of presenting maximum amount of information that can be absorbed in minimum amount of time, in the way that will not overwhelm a visitor. So strategically placing most relevant information on your website and binding that information with esthetically pleasing elements, will give a visitor chance to absorb just enough information to make decision to bounce or not.
So winning those first 7 seconds is crucial for conversion, as not bouncing immediately, means they’ll stay long enough that your website content will have a fair chance to convince them to stay. Since every website is different, there is no rule of thumb how long visitors will stay on your website, but good content, ease of navigation and nice design will definitely work in your benefit.
From the moment you website is just an idea, to the successful launch of your new website, it is important to keep on your mind that your website is, primarily, a marketing tool.
To maximize your chances to make that tool count in your business strategies, it is crucial that you chose an experienced web design company , that will carefully take these things into consideration and meet the challenges that less experienced designers, or designers whose biggest push is do do things “cheaper” wouldn’t even recognize.
Check out this Vancouver Web Design portfolio for an example of designs that work.
