Why do customers leave your website too early

Do you feel that you have too many internet travellers on your website - people who visit the site but soon leave? This may indicate that something is wrong with your website (from a technical or design perspective). Join us for a look at the most common causes of high bounce rates, as well as ways to keep customers on your website for as long as possible.

The percentage of people who visit your website but leave right away is called bounce rate. You can easily find your bounce rate in one of the common analytical tools (e.g. Google Analytics) or your webmaster can tell you. If the bounce rate is, for example, 50%, it means that every second person who visits your site will leave it again within a few seconds without any interaction. And a high bounce rate usually indicates some kind of error.

Good vs. Bad bounce rate

Do you find that sometimes people leave your website without taking any action? You can relax a little - because it happens to absolutely everyone. It's just a matter of to what extent. In fact, the average bounce rate for most sites is roughly between 41-55%. Below 40% can be considered good and if you even get below 30%, it's a very good result. However, if more than 70% or even 80% of your visitors leave your website immediately after entering, there is probably a bug somewhere.

Info: The above mentioned values are very generalized. It's important to note that optimal bounce rates can vary for different industries. For example, while the average bounce rate for food or drink sites is over 65%, the average bounce rate for real estate sites is only 44.5%. It also depends on the type of website. For example, e-commerce sites generally have a much lower bounce rate than blogs or various forums.

How to lower bounce rate?

Generally speaking, the better the site, the lower the bounce rate. However, it can sometimes happen that even the most beautiful sites with texts from professional copywriters can struggle with a high bounce rate. So what are the most common reasons and the best ways to reduce the bounce rate?

Improving and making main page more intuitive

Users form an opinion about your website and furthermore about your brand within a few seconds. Because of that it is very important for people to see the most relevant information right at the first page they visit. Therefore, get to the point right away, no bleating about useless stuff. Give your best especially to the upper part of the main page, which appears in front of the visitors at the start.

Here should be the main message of your company summarized in a few words or sentences and also mentioned a couple of things which can be found on your website. Do not forget to place a CTA (Call-To-Action) button at a visible spot, which leads customers to another sub-page with more detailed description of your services or directly to an order form. 

Enhancing the website’s loading speed

There are only a few things which can drive people more crazy than an endlessly rotating loading circle. That might be a reason why 47% of users do not like to wait for a website to load more than 2 seconds.  Every additional second of loading can result in a decrease of website’s traffic by 11%. You can measure the speed of loading of your website page on Pingdom or GTmetrix and the like. And speeding up your website is not anything difficult. First, you need to take a little critical stance towards your website. Try to assess one element after another and evaluate if it has any role (design, informative, functional etc.) or if it is only useless filler. It is often the case that DIYers who build their own websites like to use all the widgets and elements they like without any substance. But the more there are, the longer the site will take to load. So try to go for minimalism in this case and break the whole website into smaller parts, so that only what the visitor really wants to see on the page loads.  

Another common mistake is using large images in the wrong formats. Huge and high quality images are nice, but they take a long time to load, so try to avoid them on your website. Stick instead to regular quality images and classic formats like JPG or PNG, which load faster and thus prevent visitor frustration, or convert images to modern formats like WebP.

Better PPC advertising targeting

Imagine someone opened an adult toy shop in town but there would be written only “Toy Shop” at the entrance. Someone would most probably come, but many customers would turn on their heels and walk away right in the middle of the doorstep. And exactly that happens in wrong advertisement targeting. 

This issue usually takes place within PPC advertising (e.g. on Google), where it is needed to catch the customer’s attention in one or two sentences. If this task is on somebody, who does not have enough experience with writing this kind of ads, easily can happen, that most of the energy is spent on impressing customers (with titles such as “Wonderful gift to the purchase”, “Best product in the middle Europe”, etc.) while the most important about the website is forgotten. That leads to visits from people who are actually not interested in your product – but they realize it while entering the website. And every one of these click-throughs you pay yourself. 

When creating PPC advertisement texts you need to point out the benefits of your products or services, but also to describe these in the finest detail. For example, if you are a craftsman from Liberec, do not forget to mention the place of your work. Visitors to your website from Brno or Ostrava are most possibly useless for you. If you are selling trekking shoes, it is worth using the whole phrase mountain boots or terrain shoes rather than only shoes. Otherwise, you risk an army of skaters looking for stylish footwear.

So, by optimising your PPC ads well, you'll save money by not paying for clicks from those who won't buy anyway, and you'll save time by only showing ads to genuine potential customers from the start. If your existing online campaign isn't working to your liking and you don't know what to do, don't be afraid to ask online marketing experts. We will be happy to discuss everything with you, suggest possible improvements and put them into practice.

SEO analysis and relative keyword involvement

Better targeting of PPC ads is closely related to SEO – optimising a website to make it as attractive as possible for search engines to display it as high as possible in their results. This can be influenced in several ways. But one of the most important is using the right keywords.

Try to think of a few words or phrases that your potential customers may search for. For a sports equipment e-shop, this could be dumbbells, footballs, tennis equipment, sports equipment cheap, etc. Then use these phrases across your entire website. That way, search engines like Google will understand your focus better and match you with truly relevant customers - for free. "Just to add, the keywords you choose may not always be relevant and "the best". It's always a good idea to have a keyword analysis done using sophisticated analytics tools that marketing agencies use."

Tip: The use of keywords should never be at the expense of readability. For example, if you're writing an article about football equipment, don't unnecessarily use unrelated words or phrases such as hockey sticks, exercise mats, or even a table tennis bat just because another part of the site also offers them.

Trials and errors

After all, the most powerful method is trial-and-error. Within this article, we have tried to help you to lower the number of non-successful trials as much as possible. No website is perfect right from the start. There is always a testing phase after the website’s launch, where everything is tuned and edited. 

Experienced advertising agencies can help you with lowering your bounce rate, increasing overall visit rate or raising the number of successful orders and more. We have created hundreds of successful custom-made websites, we have 19 years of market experience, and we will also gladly help you to entice new customers. We can create a whole website or e-shop, prepare PPC ads or a whole campaign on social media. Are you interested in anything else as it comes to marketing? Do not hesitate to visit our blog or to contact us right away.