Bounce rate in e-commerce: how does it affect your business

For online stores, one of the most significant metrics is bounce rate. When all of your efforts go to attracting a customer to visit a website, you can still miss the point. That is, to make them stay longer in your e-commerce and, in the best case scenario, to finalise a transaction. Let’s take a closer look at the bounce rate metric and find out how it affects your business. 

photo/ Gerd Altmann

What is bounce rate?

Defining this issue can be tricky. The most basic definition proposed by Google Analytics Support says that the bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions. What does it mean in practice? An internet user entered your website but didn’t carry out any action on it, i.e. they didn’t click any buttons or skipped to a different subpage. 

It might seem an inadequate definition in some cases, such as a blog post for example. While clicking a link shared on social media and reading a whole post, a person doesn’t need to make any other action – but that doesn’t mean they weren’t engaged in this visit. 

Another concept is to measure the bounce rate considering the time spent by a visitor on the website. But again, it’s hard to estimate how long is enough for a person to not bounce but actually visit a page. 

You need to think about the intentions of a customer who visits your online store. Your products and specifics of your industry also matter. If you sell expensive items, consumers might need some time to rethink your offer or compare it with other stores. 

Moreover, you should focus on the bounce rate impact for your business. There are some types of pages where a high bounce rate is acceptable, like the aforementioned blog posts or customer service pages for example. Fortunately, you can change your preferences in Google Analytics so that you can measure the actual bounce rate tailored for your business. 

How to reduce bounce rate for your e-commerce store?

There are many reasons why people may leave your online store without adding items to their cart or taking any other action. Look at the shopping process from the customer’s point of view and refine the given aspects:

1. Page loading time – it can have a crucial impact on bounce rate. Internet users are impatient so they won’t wait forever (which means more than a few seconds nowadays) for a website to load. 
2. Call to action (CTA) visibility – give your visitors clear instructions on what to do and where to find the information that they’re probably looking for. 
3. Attractive content – make sure that pictures and descriptions of your products are appealing. 
4. Unintrusive ads and pop-ups – don’t interfere with customer experience.
5. Responsive web design – refine the mobile version of your site so that you won’t scare off smartphone and tablet users. 
6. Adequate ads – make sure that your campaigns are designed properly so that you won’t mislead customers. Only redirect to your store to show relevant content (a huge role is played here by personalisation based on marketing automation or remarketing). 

Read more about bounce rate in e-commerce: https://www.growcode.com/blog/bounce-rate-ecommerce-metric/

You still won’t have an impact on visitors who entered your website accidentally or a possible disruption while surfing the internet that they experienced. Therefore, even after improving every aspect of your e-commerce store it’s impossible to have a bounce rate that equals zero. You can only work on reducing it – not eliminating it. 

To conquer the e-commerce world you should focus on many metrics. Besides bounce rate, take a closer look at Customer Lifetime Value (CLV/ LTV) and conversion rate. Once you set up a perfect strategy based on data, don’t stop optimising to get the best results in a long period.

Author: Sheikh Hazaifa