Bounce Rate Analytics: Discover Why Website Visitors Are Bouncing Before They Buy

Website analytics deliver important data sets and statistics that allow you to assess aspects of website performance such as how your visitors are finding your site as well as the behavioral characteristics of your visitors while on your site. Studying your traffic details delivers one of the best means of supporting a proper sales funnel and user-friendly website experience for all your visitors. Pay close attention to website analytics to improve your conversion rates and increase sales.

Thanks to the free website traffic investigation tools provided by Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics), you don't have to worry about making room in your budget for an expensive analytics firm. Google Analytics offers beginner-friendly solutions for those of you with limited or even no experience at all. You can learn as you go and explore more advanced features as you get more comfortable.

While it's important to monitor how people find your website, perhaps what's even more important is identifying potential reasons why your site visitors are leaving before they buy from you. A key website performance indicator reported for your website that you need to pay careful attention to is bounce rate. Bounce rates indicate the percentage of traffic that visits your website but leaves before they view any additional pages within your site. Although one might assume that all visits to their website are good visits, visitors expressing the properties of a pogo stick and quickly bouncing from your site usually indicates that your website isn't performing as well as it could be.

Your target bounce rate should be between approximately 20 to 35 percent. Anything under 20 percent and you're golden. Bounce rates over 50 percent indicate the need to fix individual pages and examine your options for website optimization. However, there isn't a concrete range for ideal bounce rates because the main objective of a particular webpage can vary significantly from one page or site to the next. For example, a high bounce rate for an informational site may not have the same negative implications as it would for an e-commerce website. If a visitor doesn't view additional pages of an informational site this isn't necessarily a negative result if the main objective is to drive traffic to just one page for branding or link building purposes. In contrast, a high bounce rate for an e-commerce website where multiple steps/pages are required before a purchase can be made indicates a serious problem because prospects are bouncing before they reach the shopping cart to make a purchase.

Closely monitoring your pages with the highest bounce rates will clue you in on specific areas that need adjustment in order to promote a healthy sales funnel, encouraging more internal clicks and keeping visitors moving from their entry page through to your site's end call to action, such as your shopping cart page, service sign-up page or lead generation form.

Some of the traffic that immediately bounces from your site is simply caused by random sections of your content pulling people in for obscure keywords with minimal competition. For example, an article on your site about online marketing might make a comparison of online guerilla marketers to "creative clowns" and you could very well pull in visitors looking to rent a clown for their kid's birthday party.

In addition, high bounce rates frequently point out problematic content and sales copy, highlighting pages that require copyediting or improved sales scripts to provide prospects with sufficient evidence of why they should buy from you. Confusing website navigation that causes your visitors to get lost and bounce back to the search results is another common area that needs fixing for improved conversion rates. And for those of you who notice alarming bounce rates on your website's e-commerce checkout page, you may be losing customers because of a lack of trust. Make sure that you have proper security standards and certificates in place to make them feel safe enough to provide you with their personal and financial information.