What is a homepage bounce rate?

It is the percentage of visitors that enter a site at the homepage and then leave without clicking a subsequent page. This indicates more than half your homepage visitors are immediately leaving. You can’t sell to them. They are gone!.

Is your homepage a bouncer? If your bounce rate is over 50%, you have a problem.

How Can you Improve User Experience?

What do Non-Bounce Visitors Click? You address a high bounce rate by understanding the user experience. What do visitors who continue on into the site click on?

To do this:

• implement the low-cost heat mapping tool at CrazyEgg.com to reveal which page elements get clicked.
• Then experiment with new approaches to increase the click-through-rate. Using the CrazyEgg “heat map” display you can easily identify elements of the page that are not receiving high click activity. The heat map provides the information you need to start improving and testing your page.

What Traffic Sources Contribute to a High Bounce Rate?

The easiest way to determine this is to dive into your analytics software to see what networks (such as Google or LinkedIn) are driving visitors to the homepage that have a high bounce rate.

CLICK TO VIEW

In Google Analytics there are two steps to locate this information:

• Click the left navigation link called Behavior> Landing Pages > then click on your homepage URL.
• Above the list of landing page URLs, click on the tab “Secondary Dimension” and select “Source”

You don’t have a lot of control over visitors who are listed as “Direct” (AKA ‘none’), but you don’t want to see high-bounce visitors coming from Search or Email campaigns.

What’s Next? A/B Testing

With this data, you can identify the high bounce sources and put a strategy in place to improve the expectation for visitors arriving from this source. Improving on-page Calls-to-Action (CTAs) elements might include:

• Change your offers
• Change the placement of offers on a page
• Change the description of an offer
• Reduce the number of offers on a page

Website analytics should drive important decisions regarding lead generation. It can’t do that with inaccurate data.

Nine out of ten companies make critical mistakes implementing website analytics, with the result that important business decisions are based on bad data.

Get your analytics in order by:

• Implementing the code correctly,
• Filtering out non-human traffic,
• Setting up goal conversion tracking.

Four steps in Google Analytics to gain a clear, comprehensive picture of your business.

Don’t Go it Alone → Hire a Professional

→ Analytics software platforms have become more complex in recent years. It’s now much more than simply adding a snippet of code to your website.

Given the value these services can provide in the decision-making process, there is value in hiring a certified analytics implementation company to set up your site correctly. From here, your marketing team can analyze and report on correct data.

→ For all our clients we recommend iDimension – a certified Google Partner – for their website analytics and measurement setup.

An effective website performs a critical role for your company → it generates leads.

Your homepage should serve as a launchpad for your conversion path, which demands visitors get to the products pages. Calls-to-action should drive visitors to this content.

Drive ’em To Products Content

• If visitors do not navigate to your Products or Services content, you are unlikely to sell to them. Once visitors land on a Products page – compel them to action.
• The Products area is where data sheets, white papers, and demos work well and indicate a higher level of engagement when visitors download or interact with them. Aim for at least 20% of total site page views to be product area pages and focus on growing the number.

“If visitors do not navigate to your products or services content, once again, you’re unlikely to sell to them.”

Test Other Landing Pages & Their Calls-to-Action

• With goal conversion tracking installed in Google Analytics, you can test a variety of calls-to-action. Hubspot put together 30 Call-to-Action examples to give you a head-start on what to test and what will work best.

Put the pieces in place and it all starts to click!