What is a Bounce Rate? The percentage of people who visit a web site, then leave without exploring the rest of the site. Successful store owners know that having a high conversion rate and a low bounce rate is crucial. Reducing your bounce rate is the first step to being on the way to increasing your conversions. It is the first step because it tells you how engaged customers are and if they will continue to browse your store. As with any store, whether online or brick and mortar, you will only convert a percentage of your store shoppers to actual buyers. However, once they invest the time to browse your store the odds of them actually making a purchase drastically increases. Below are three tips for how you can decrease your bounce rate to reach your ultimate goal, increasing and maintaining your conversion rate.



3 Steps to improving your Bounce Rate:

1. Discover Your Bounce Rate: In order to win the race you need to know where the starting line is. Invest in an analytics program and learn how to find your bounce rate. Be sure to measure it from a large group of visitors, several thousand would be ideal. You should find that the vast majority of your visitors enter through the homepage. Depending on the volume of your traffic, you should experience a bounce rate between 10 - 20 % on the homepage. If the bounce rate on your homepage is over 30% you should seek professional help immediately! You could be losing about 20% of potential customers in a matter of seconds.

2. Make positive changes: If you are experiencing a high bounce rate, your site is not engaging your customers. It is far too easy for someone to click the back button and try for something better. Finding a way to draw in your customers the second they enter your site and having a strong visual presence is the key to doing so. A professional quality design is the best solution. You want your site to inspire confidence, be visually captivating, present products in an appealing manner, show the range of products, and finally ensure that shoppers can easily navigate their way through the site.

3. Invest in your top landing pages: If 50% of your visitors enter through the homepage, odds are that about 30% are entering through your top-level category pages; to those visitors, this is your homepage. Take the same approach here as you would with your homepage and invest in well designed pages that highlight and recommend products. This will encourage viewers to further browse your products, which will contribute to your overall conversion rate.

Utilizing these steps can potentially lead to a substantial increase in customer retention. Stay tuned for more tips on how you can further improve on the performance of your store.