…Is A Reason To Make A Decision (Part 2)
March 11, 2009
It’s always a good idea to know how and why your customers reach your site. Equally important though, is how and why your customers leave. Good web analytic programs should be able to tell you bounce rates and exit rates for each page of your website. Bounce rates and exit rates can seem kind of similar, so let me provide the Google Analytics definition of each:
Bounce rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.
Exit rate: This metric identifies the number of exits from your site, and, as with entrances, it will always be equal to the number of visits when applied over your entire website.
So how do we use this information?
A high bounce rate means that people arrive at your site and find no reason to get into your content/products. They’ve decided you either don’t have what they want, or that it will be too much trouble to find it on your site (read: bad navigation and/or design). An ugly site is a bad reason to have a high bounce rate. Imagine you’ve got a restaurant with your customers’ favorite food. If your restaurant is dirty, they’ll probably leave and never come back.
So why did they wind up on a path to the wrong destination? You have to look at your traffic sources (see Decision part 1). Is most of your traffic coming from search engines? You should probably review your keywords.
Remember, search engines can put users anywhere on your website that’s most relevant to their search. They may go to a specific product page, or they may go to the About Us page, or they may go to a contact page. Make sure that the keywords really match the page that users will be landing at.
If most of your traffic is from referring sites, make sure that the referring link accurately describes what users will find on your page. If a referring link says “Free offer from our trusted partner!” and they click through to a site with price tags all over it, you can bet they’ll bounce.
If a large amount of your traffic is “direct” (people clicking a bookmark or directly typing in your URL), you will probably have lower bounce rates. Think about it…these are people who know exactly what your site is; they’re going to you on purpose. Unless they can see in one look that there’s nothing new on your site, they’ll probably stick around.
In a nutshell, you have to look at the path users took to get to you (traffic source), and figure out why your page is different than what they expected.
What about your exit rates? Exit rates tell you the percentage of users who leave your site from specific pages. So if I go to www.bestbuy.com and look through their computer products, then car audio, then DVDs and then I X out of the page, the DVD page is my exit page. This is not a bounce because I viewed more than one page. So how can you use this information?
Imagine Company X has a 50 percent bounce rate on their product ordering page. Half of the people who go to an ordering page abandoned their purchase. For one reason or another, they’re uncomfortable making a purchase (it could be your check-out security, or they’re unsure you know what product they’re buying). These are customers who had half a mind to become your customer. They’re interested in your product. It’s urgent to get the exit rate down on that kind of page.
What if instead you have a high exit rate from a content page, like a blog? If you want users to stick around on your site, you have to make sure they have options. If your site is difficult to navigate and you don’t have any related content/products linked on that page, where would you expect them to go? Don’t put users in a dead-end; when constructing a page, ask yourself “THEN what?” Design your page in such a way that users can quickly and easily flow through your content or products.
Remember, don’t use analytics to merely tell you what’s what. Use it to make your site better. Analytics give you a reason to make a business decision.
