Bounce Rate

The landing pages used in your PPC campaigns play a pivotal part in whether your marketing efforts are successful or not. Having the right keywords and fantastic ad text will be rendered useless if your landing page does not hit the mark. Instead, a poor landing page will see people making their way to the back button and you’ll be left without the sale.

Avoid making any of the following five mistakes to get the most from your PPC landing page:

Not Matching The Query to the Landing Page
There are few reasons (if any) for someone to end up on a landing page irrelevant to their search query. I searched on [leaf blowers], clicked on a PPC ad and wound up on a (well-know brand’s) home page. The landing page contained no reference to my search query whatsoever, leaving me to find what I want on the site myself. More annoyingly, the PPC ad specifically referenced my query, and even told me how cheap I could get the products from them; cue disgruntled shopper!

Unclear Call to Action
Yes, another obvious one, but it’s still common to see a call to action hidden, unclear or below a page fold. A good call to action should stand out; it’s likely to use contrasting colours and strong “action” text.

I performed a search on [London MOTs], clicked on a PPC ad and landed on the page below. I’ve been sent to a home page (again) which sadly has no clear call to action. There is a weak one, written in a light blue font, on a dark blue background saying: “Click here to book online”. This faint text is not even underlined to make it look like a clickable link. Ideally this page would have a much stronger, more obvious call to action in a clear button form using contrasting colours saying “Book Your MOT Online Now”.

Lack Of Focus
It’s tempting to show your great offers on multiple pages of your website, but this can do more harm than good. If people searched on [red kettles] offering visitors these along with bread bins, chopping boards and 25% off bed linen may see them wandering off never to be seen again. There’s a fine line between cross selling/increasing the value of a shopping cart and distracting someone to the point of no return.

Wordy Page Copy
It is common practice to not read every single word on a [web] page. Many of us are in a rush and having endless pages of text is undesirable.

Use bullet points to make text easier to scan and have separate pages for subcategories if necessary. I came across a solicitor’s website where there were 1,400 words on the PPC landing page used. The content on the page in question could have been placed on multiple pages and bullet points could have been used to break the text down. If the page had made use of anchor tags it would have been even easier to use.

Failing To Create Confidence in Your Brand
Whether confidence is instilled in the buyer from the brand itself with clear USPs or whether it’s instilled by other customers in the form of testimonials, you have to make some kind of effort! You must create or reinforce confidence in your brand on your PPC landing page. Take a look at the page below.  This is what not to do - no words of welcome, no brand USPs, no product star ratings/user reviews and no link to any other customers’ testimonials – instead, there’s a total reliance that the brand is already known and understood and will speak for itself:

If you’d like some help on improving your PPC landing pages, let us know!

Bounce rate can easily and quickly be defined as the percentage of visitors who enter a website but, leave before navigating to another page.

“Leaving” can be accounted for in four ways:

1. The visitor click the back button
2. The visitor closes the browser
3. The visitor types a new url into their browser and visits that url instead
4. The visitor does nothing for 30 minutes (sometimes called a session time out)

It is an extremely useful stat; it is a good way to quickly gauge if your landing pages are relevant to visitors. If a visitor bounces then this can be an indication that your visitors do not find your site relevant, at least, not by their first impressions.

From this stat you can work out which landing pages need to be improved, which keywords work and if your PPC advertising and links from referral sites sending you relevant traffic.

However a high bounce rate is not always bad. Here are five ways in which a high bounce rate is not only normal but expected:

1. It’s Your Blog – It is normal for a blog to have a high bounce rate. If you have a successful blog with many returning visitors, it is normal that they only want to read your latest blog post as they have read the other content. Or they are looking for information about one thing and the page contains all the information they need. A better metric for measuring success for a blog could be RSS subscribers, newsletter sign-ups, or even social metrics such as Facebook “likes”.
2. Your Site Has Only One Page - If your site only has one page you will receive a 100% bounce rate. Time on site (and therefore bounce rate) is calculated between the first cookie given to a user when they enter the site and their last page view. This means if your site has only one page there will be no way to track time on page or bounce rate. It may be worth adding a few more pages. Adding a thank you page for people subscribing or enquiring will allow you to track more metrics on some visitors. 
3. It’s Your Contact Page – If you are seeing high bounce rates on your contact page it is because the visitor wants to find some information about you e.g address or phone number, this will be normal for local businesses with a physical location like a restaurant. This can be especially true if you cannot buy products online. Here, tracking phone enquiries can be especially important.
4. You Have External Links On Your Landing Page – External links on your page can take users away from your site, and sometimes these “external” links can be owned by you! If you have a subdomain for taking payments, logging in, or editing your “basket” then (assuming you haven’t allowed for it in Google Analytics) visitors clicking these may be considered bounces. This is common with linking to sister sites and when your site checkout is provided by a third party.  If you haven’t set up Analytics to track across domains it’s time to invest some time to get it set up correctly. 
5. You Have Effective Ads On Your Website – if users are arriving on your site and immediately clicking off through an advert then it’s probably time to pat yourself on the back. If those clicks are financially rewarding to you the there is little to worry about – if not, it may be time to optimize your ad layout.

As you can see there are plenty of reasons to not worry about your bounce rate quite so much. The best bet is always to use bounce rate in conjunction with other metrics such as sales, sign-ups and enquiries and to ensure that if you’re sending customers “away”, you’re doing it for a good reason.