Your e-commerce bounce rate is an all-important metric and shows how many visitors you work so hard to attract that bounce away from your pages without spending a cent. Business insights report software is a simple way to set a benchmark bounce rate and track performance to identify golden opportunities for improvement.
In this guide, we’ll talk about setting a benchmark (and why you should) and some of the most influential factors that drive customers away.
How Are E-Commerce Bounce Rate Benchmarks Useful?
Your e-commerce store is flooded with data daily. Using analytics in e-commerce is how you harness that data to make critical business decisions. Landing and product pages are among the most important pages for an e-commerce store. If a prominent page simply isn’t converting into sales revenue, you need to know.
Why Bother With a Bounce Rate Benchmark?
Setting a benchmark gives you a target to work towards and emphasizes the importance of bounce rates, so you don’t take your eye off the ball at a crucial moment or miss that your bounce rate has slipped so far that it’ll take an enormous effort to recover. Retailers pitch for the lowest possible bounce rate they can achieve–100% conversions make for a happy bottom line.
But, in reality, the average bounce rate is about 20% to 45% in e-commerce, and anything under 35% is considered good. Having a zero bounce rate is impossible, so don’t panic if yours is between these percentages–it’s absolutely normal.
Key Factors Impacting Your Bounce Rate
If you’ve completed your bounce rate analytics and found the outcome less than satisfying, it’s time to make some changes. There are many reasons a customer might leave an e-commerce store without buying anything. Below, we’ve listed some of the most common issues.
Website Navigation
If your e-commerce site is rammed with large image files, videos, or moving parts, it can be a major distraction and make it difficult for customers to find what they’re looking for. Although you might want to include every selling point possible, less is often more in e-commerce. Readable text, clear fonts, carefully selected images, and a user-friendly navigation toolbar or search box make your site fun and stress-free to shop from.
Stacks of Ads
Paid ad placements can be a big revenue boost but they can also affect your bounce rate. Many e-commerce stores clutter pages with ads, CTAs, promotions, and pop-up discount codes and find their marketing competes with itself. Internal linking is less intrusive or visually disorientating, or you can curate content targeted to your customer demographic to keep them in your store.
Safety Concerns
One of the fastest ways to improve your bounce rate analytics is to enhance the security controls on your retail site. If customers can’t find information that makes them confident enough to type in their credit card details (such as a privacy policy or terms of use), they might decide to shop elsewhere. Having an SSL certification and a trust seal on your checkout page conveys professionalism and payment security that further cements customer trust.
Complex Shipping Policies
We’ve all had the same experience where we’ve decided to buy something online and then get to the checkout basket only to find the shipping costs more than the product or will take too long. Transparent postage costs and guidance about international shipping times will ensure your buyer doesn’t abandon their cart at the last minute.
Broken Links
Lastly, you should verify that every page on your site is working and every link is up to date. Buyers will bounce from a site pretty quickly if they land on:
- Blank pages
- 404 errors
- Broken product links
- Empty contact pages
If you have a high bounce rate, try exploring your e-commerce site from a few browsers and devices to check that there aren’t expired pages or outdated links that negatively affect your customer experience.
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