Customers Leaving Your Site Too Early?

You can’t close a sale through your website if you can’t keep the customer there.

The Bounce Rates

Caroline Melberg at Small Business Mavericks asks a good question: "Is your bounce rate too high?"

She talks about seeing what pages on your site have the highest amount of bounces and fixing what is wrong with them to keep visitors around.

They’re Not Getting Away That Easily

Alexandria K. Brown (aka The Ezine Queen) talks about the concept of using pop-ups as attempts to still make money off the ones that leave, but while I respect Brown (we have published some of her work in the past), I’m not sure this is the best idea because pop-ups like Brown admits can be quite annoying. If you have been reading my articles for very long, I believe you know my stance on customer annoyance. However, Brown is right in not wanting the customers to get away so easily.

You do want to give them a reason to come back to your site. I just don’t think pop-ups are the way to leave a good impression.

As Long as They’re Still There

While they are still at your site, you need to make it as easy as possible for customers to find your checkout pages for one. It’s all about usability. Categorizing products correctly certainly helps as Stoney deGeyter discusses.

Offering a variety of payment options is another concept your eCommerce site may be missing. If you give the customer more options, it only makes sense that you will get more sales, because what if you don’t offer the option they prefer? They may break down and go with an option that you do offer, but they are just as likely to go to one of your competitors that does offer that option. Why take the chance?

As Melberg’s post suggests though, you should really be looking at your site’s stats to try to pinpoint the pages your customers are leaving your site from. You can then evaluate the pages themselves and make the proper adjustments to optimize them for the sale.

What are your suggestions for keeping customers at your site?

There are 3 Comments. Add Yours.

Property in Tuscany
February 23, 2010 at 7:11 am

One of the other reason (probably is the main one) why one site has a high bounce rate is because their runner are just too eager to get the highest number of hits and forget to actually keep an eye on the quality of the visitors. If you don’t get the right visitors who are interested in your product you’ll always have a very high bounce rate…
Erika Slater
February 23, 2010 at 8:08 am

Well, bounce rate and average visitor length are those controversial figures that everybody gets "hot under collar" about without really understanding how they’re calculated by the Search Engines.

For example on visitor length this can only be calculated if the visitor goes to another page. So if they’ve landed on a specific page to promote something and exit site from same page then visitor length will show 0 seconds even if they’ve been reading the page for 5 minutes. But that may be acceptable.

Likewise on bounce rate if they hit a landing page because of a promotion but have no interest in anything else you promote then your bounce rate will look poor as this is determined by if they exit site without visiting another page. Again a high bounce rate may be fine depending on what you’re doing.

Yes, it’s a minefield but you have to understand how these figures are calculated before spending huge amounts of time trying to fix something that may not be broken and just a result of the specific campaign you’re promoting.

Erika
alan
February 23, 2010 at 8:33 am

Know your customers/visitors. You can always improve bounce rate if you better target content for visitors. For example, if your site is just a bunch of general information to attract adsense clicks, you will have a high bounce rate. There has to be something the visitor needs; something that fills a need. If that something is a product, the sales page have to be attractive enough to enourage people to read and, perhaps, sign up for a newsletter. If that something is information intended to build a relationship, it must be kept fresh.



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Customers Leaving Your Site Too Early?

Perhaps some investigation and adjustments are in order.

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