High Bounce Rate and Its Reasons

You might have spent a lot of money, time and effort on various online marketing channels to bring visitors to your website, but everything would be in vain if most of the visitors don’t bother to look or navigate to other pages in your site. If this scenario sounds familiar, then you are dealing with high bounce rate and your attention needs to be fully focused on this catastrophe…well, almost a catastrophe. High bounce rate can eat into your profit as termites eat into your woodwork making it hollow and useless.

Bounce rate has been always been a significant metric to analyze the performance or effectiveness of any website.

Bounce rate can happen in any of the following circumstances:

1) Your website’s home page/landing page has ample information to meet the visitor’s intention in a short span of time then he/she may not access other web pages. (In such cases, should you really bother about bounce rates? Not really.)

2) Your landing page did not meet the user’s expectation; they came and left instantly or stayed for just a fraction of a second. (You definitely did not meet the goal this time).

Ok, this is just one way of looking at the bounce rate. Let’s see what Avinash Kaushik, the analytics guru, says about the bounce rate.

"The percentage of website visitors who see just one page on your site"

"The percentage of website visitors who stay on the site for a small amount of time (usually five seconds or less)."

The bounce rate is associated with the overall website goal because bounce rates are the real culprits who often lend a blow to your conversion rates. In this article, I am going to discuss the impact of high bounce rates with respect to a retail ecommerce website.

Are you achieving the expected sales/conversions? If not, why not? High bounce rate could be the reason.

The following are some of the reasons that deliver high bounce rate and low conversion.


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Fail to keep-up user’s attention: You have lured an online shopper through the banner ads or PPC ads or through any other online advertisement, but if you fail to hold the user’s attention once they arrive at the landing page, you might get a high bounce rate. In other words, a user after clicking the ad would expect similar information/call to action in the landing page, if they identify anything irrelevant; there is a chance that a bounce may occur.

Your Website Design and Navigation: Sloppy and boring website design with poor navigation leads to high bounce rate. Poor navigation can be anything – No global navigation, No proper site structuring, No bread crumb, and so on. It is imperative to maintain the global link throughout the website and educate users about the page he is surfing. Even if everything is in its right place, sometimes users will NOT be happy with your offer. In such cases, a link to other important pages (similar or related product’s page) might help users to navigate through your website.

Check your product price: Product price matters a lot to online shoppers. If the buying price is just too high you might likely get a high bounce rate. Avoid camouflaged pricing; it’s a sure tonic for a neat exit.

No product FSDI: Comprehensive and Unique Product Information (Features, Specifications, Description and Image) and other relevant content with proper call to actions influence online shoppers to make informed buying decisions. If you have no or less information about the product, then you’ll definitely get a high bounce rate.

No titles and headings: If there is no relevant web page title and headings, the user will think that he has arrived at an irrelevant page and will not look further or browse.

Content Presentation: Displaying the most important content of your website below the fold can also lead to a high bounce rate.

Outbound Links: Too many external links in the form of widget and banner ads may irritate the user, and he may bounce right out of your site.

Making your visitors wait: Online shoppers have no time to wait if your web page takes forever to load. Here is a good resource to check your website loading time.

Browser incompatibility: Some browsers will not display your landing page properly. You should check how your website looks in different browsers.

Check out some great resources for minimizing bounce rate:

1. How to analyze and Improve Bounce Rate
2. Bounce Rate - Standard Metrics #3

The above are just a few scenarios that might lead to high bounce rates. If you have analyzed and found other reasons that can escalate a higher bounce rate, then please feel free to share here.