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3 Tips to Optimize your Ecommerce Bounce Rate

If you’re seeing your ecommerce bounce rate significantly exceed the industry average of 20-45%...Houston, we have a problem. That’s right, a high ecommerce bounce rate is a strong indicator that something may be awry with your ecommerce site. Are visitors not interested in what you’ve featured on your homepage? Maybe your ads lead to the wrong landing page—or maybe your landing page looks completely different than your ad?

Whatever the case may be, you’ll need to spring into action to fix your bounce rate!

Keep reading for 3 tips to optimize your ecommerce bounce rate and identify which factors may be driving up the metric in the first place.

Create a Cohesive Ad-to-Website Experience

When building a digital marketing campaign, consistency is key! Why? Because If your website branding looks different from the ad that a visitor clicked on, they may get confused and say “see you later” to your site. 

If your ad features a specific product or review but the destination page doesn’t align, the visitor may just bounce rather than sticking around to find the item they saw in the ad. When building your next ad campaign, be mindful of where visitors will end up on your site when they click your ad. Showing them the exact content they’re looking for rather than your homepage, or even worse, the wrong product altogether could be the key to reducing your bounce rate.

Remove Known Bot Traffic From Your Reports

If visitor duration is three seconds or less on a high bounce page, there’s a high likelihood that bot traffic is heavily impacting your bounce rate. But, don’t worry, not all bot traffic is bad. In fact, bots are actually necessary to index your online store on search engines like Google. 

That said, you should still definitely partner with your web analytics lead to set you up with a reporting view that removes any known bot traffic. Removing known bot traffic from your reporting will allow you to take a deeper look at site visitors that at the very least can pass a turing test

Improve Your Site Navigation and Content 

If a visitor spends a considerable amount of time on one page of your site before bouncing, it’s a strong indicator that your site could use some work. That’s why, one way to optimize your ecommerce bounce rate is by improving your site navigation and content.

Point blank: if shoppers find your website hard to navigate and confusing, they’ll leave and go to a website where it is easier to find the information they’re looking for. 

Spend some time thinking critically about where you can make improvements to your site. Is it time to update your headlines? What if you reduce the number of CTAs on your homepage? Once you have a few hypotheses as to what needs to be changed, it’s time to start testing!

Invest in a CRO tool that allows you to experiment with various elements of your site and understand which changes will drive your bounce rate(s) down.

How to effectively reduce an ecommerce bounce rate will vary company by company–that said, we hope these three tips give you a good place to start optimizing your bounce rate today! For many more tactical tips on how to optimize every single foundational ecommerce KPI, check out our new guide: The Marketer's Ultimate Guide to Ecommerce Metrics.