The Marriage of Bounce Rate and Conversion

If you get 200,000 unique visitors to your website and 80% of them just check out one page, would you consider your website a success?

At the end of the day, the most important factor for increasing page views and unique visitors is content. If the content is not engaging and relevant to users, then they are going to "bounce" and never come back. The "bounce rate" is the percentage of visitors who come to a site and leave after viewing a single page. A high bounce rate can indicate usability issues, that visitors didn't like what they saw or didn't find what they were looking for which is very troubling for a business and for a marketing campaign. The more pages a user visits along a preferred click path, the more likely they are to find and complete a call-to-action.

However, it’s important to understand that bounce rate isn’t all-telling and doesn’t take into account the reason for all “bounces.”

Consider how you navigate around the web when you’re searching for an answer to a question. If you’re like me, you go to a search engine, type in some keywords and then proceed to open several page links in new tabs. But, because you are looking for a specific answer, once you’ve read the information on a page, chances are that you simply close the tab whether you have found the answer that you wanted or not.

However, your visit would still be measured as a bounce. Did you have a bad experience? Not necessarily. You read the information you needed, and just because you didn’t need any additional information from the site, your visit should not be automatically considered a fail.  When businesses become too preoccupied with optimizing for bounce rate, they make terrible UX design decisions just to get people to click on a link—any link—at any cost to the overall user experience (Harley, 2016).

The best way to determine if your bounce rate is negative or not is by comparing it with the site’s conversion rate. Every site is different. Some sites may have a high bounce rate but still convert well. Others may have a low bounce rate but not convert well at all. In general, however, the longer visitors spend on your website, the higher the chances that a conversion will occur. So, if a high percentage of conversions are occurring then chances are the bounce rates stem from other issues aside form your website such as attracting the wrong target audience.

An example of a successful conversion and bounce rate campaign comes from a case study conducted by Hubspot that followed a business, who wished to remain anonymous, that set out to redo their homepage as they knew it wasn’t performing the best that it could. While the company was successful in increasing site traffic year over year, its conversion rate remained below 2%, and its bounce rate was in the 70% to 80% range, compared to the industry average of 30%-50%.

After A/B testing the old page vs. the redesigned page, which included stronger calls to action, meaningful graphics and better usability, the conversion rate of the newly designed homepage increased by 106% while the bounce rate lowered to the 40-50% range (Meher, 2017).

Search engines and marketing campaigns will deliver the traffic and the better your content is, the more likely the visitors will be to spend more time on your site and not “bounce.” This will lead to an increased number of sales, or conversions, depending on what your website’s goal is. While Al Bundy says that you can't have one without the other when it comes to love and marriage, I believe that bounce rate and conversion is the real dynamic duo. 

References

Harley, A. (2016, November 13). Optimize for Return Visits, not Bounce Rate. Retrieved from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/return-visits-not-bounce/

Meher, J. (2017, July 28). Extreme Homepage Makeover: How to Increase Your Conversion Rate 106%. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31104/Extreme-Homepage-Makeover-How-to-Increase-Your-Conversion-Rate-106.aspx