Your website is your online chance to connect to your target market. It is the chance to influence them to follow your call to action to have them call your sign up for your mailing list or even purchase something. So if your visitors are leaving as soon as they get to your website, then you are leaving business on the table.
A website metric that you want to pay attention to is something called the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your site on the same page that the landed on your site…. so basically what that means is they come to your website, look at the page for about 5 seconds and then hit the back button or enter another URL in the browser address bar. A bounce rate of about 75% means that 3 out of every 4 people who come to your website leave as soon as they land on your website. This isn’t a good rate. You want to get your bounce rate down to below 30%.
What could be going on with a high bounce rate?
- Your traffic is not targeted at all. People are coming to your website and expecting something else entirely.
- Your traffic is targeted and whatever page your visitors are landing on, they don’t feel connected to your website, or like they can get what they need from your website.
You can place a form on your website asking visitors if they have found what they are looking for. That should give you some insight into your target market and what they are expecting, or what they feel is missing from your website. The information gathered from this informal survey will help you to discover what can improve your bounce rate, and therefore conversion rate on your website. Sometimes this information can open up a brand new product line which will increase the revenues for your business.
Getting targeted traffic to your website isn’t as difficult as it may seem. Strategically placing links to your website on the web will go a long way towards that targeted traffic as well as clearly describing what you are linking to. Making sure your links are on related sites goes a long way to making the traffic more targeted. It may reduce the number of visitors to your website, but those visitors that do come to your website will be highly targeted visitors. Remember, the key isn’t getting the most traffic, but making the most sales. So you would do better sending 100 people to your website if 40 of them converted into sales as opposed to sending 1000 visitors to your website if only 10 of them converted into sales.
