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A high bounce rate is bad for any website, but is even more troublesome for an online store.

In a nutshell, your bounce rate reflects the number of visitors who come to your site and leave without vising any other pages. In other words, a high bounce rate means that you’re not making an instant connection with customers, which spells potential disaster for generating sales.

Never fear, your ecommerce geek is here. Watch today’s video for 5 foolproof ways to reduce bounce rates with your ecommerce site.

Happy selling!
-Matt Winn, Social Media Manager, Volusion

Here’s the transcript if you’d like to read along:

Hi everybody! My name is Matt and I’m a Social Media Manager here at Volusion. Welcome to Two Minute Tuesdays, where we give you two minutes of ecommerce advice to bolster your online success.

Today we’re going to continue talking about important metrics for your ecommerce site. Last week we talked about how to increase average order value and this week we’re going to discuss bounce rates. Simply put, a bounce rate is defined as a customer coming to your site and leaving without visiting any other page, thus coining the term, “bounce.” Clearly, you don’t want customers bouncing from your site because that means they’re not buying anything. So to help things along, here are 5 foolproof ways to reduce bounce rates.

First, before you can do anything about you current bounce rates, you need to know where they stand. To do so, get into your Google Analytics profile and check what pages have the highest bounce rates so you can begin to optimize them. Typically, your bounce rates come from your homepage or key landing pages from pay-per-click ads, so the rest of these tips will focus on those pages.

Reducing bounce rates is all about providing focus, so give your customers and site visitors something to focus on once they arrive. One of the best things you can do, especially if you’re running pay-per-click campaigns that offer promotions, is to focus on those promotions on your homepage or landing page. This really seals the deal to let people know what they’re getting into. Thus, highlighting these promotions is a great use of real estate.

Along the same lines of focus, create a focus on your featured products. If you have most visitors landing on your homepage, provide some favorite products for them to immediately see. Having featured products on your homepage gives your customers an idea of what your online store is about, helping them to go further into different pages.

Fourth, decrease your load times. If you’re a Volusion customer, you can easily do this by enabling your CDN or content distribution network (if you’re on V11 of our platform). This will help decrease load times, preventing people from bouncing because they’re waiting for you site to load.

Last, make sure you’re making a good first impression with your site design. If customers get to your site either organically, through paid search or via social media and see an unimpressive design, they won’t trust your site and will leave immediately. The best marketing investment you can make is design – make sure your site looks good or people are going to leave.

I hope these tips are helpful in reducing your bounce rates, especially before the holidays come up. If you have any questions, we’re always happy to help.

From me to you, happy selling!