Bounce rate is a very important indicator of how effective your marketing strategy is. The bounce rate factor is directly connected to the number of conversions you are going to achieve, regardless of the industry you are in.

In this article, we are going to explain what bounce rates are, how to identify issues related to them and what are the most effective steps that you can take to improve them. The following steps are quite important, especially for businesses that sell hardware and software products.

Following metrics and identifying issues

It is no wonder that Google Analytics has become such a popular webmaster tool. Its implementation is quite user-friendly, and you immediately get to follow various analytics related to your web page.

This tool can be effectively used for analyzing a variety of landing pages, where the traffic is coming from and how visitors generally behave on your website.

Therefore, the first step that should be taken is an in-depth analysis of landing page performance, as every business that is trying to make a sale is utilizing them to successfully make it happen.

Taking this step will provide you with a starting point, that is, it will show you what you are dealing with. However, the tool is going to be used throughout the whole process for monitoring the effects of changes made on the landing pages.

Now, let’s move on to the best practices that will improve your landing page performance and reduce your bounce rates significantly.

Taking the right course of action

Don’t worry if you are struggling with bounce rates – we are going to go through a list of things you could do to reduce them significantly.

• Content organization – Re-evaluate the state of content on your landing pages. The simple rules you should follow is keeping it short, and relying on bullet points. A regular paragraph should not exceed more than three lines, as long paragraphs will cause the visitor to lose focus, making them want to leave the page.

• Clean visitor flow – This is an important one. Many companies want to do multiple processes all at once. Remember, if your goal is to sell a product, focus solely on it, so avoid putting popups on landing pages.It might seem like a reasonable plan, but it is quite stressful and distracting. If you want the landing page to increase your email list, put a small call-to-action, but let the primary focus be on the sale you are trying to make.

• Prominent call-to-action – Don’t be shy, both you and the visitor know the purpose of the landing page. Putting up an eye-catching call-to-action (CTA) will significantly improve your results, as you will help the customer continue the purchase process.

Also, use the call-to-action to promote your product. If your company sells software, make sure to offer a free trial to your visitors, and state it in your CTA. The CTA should be something like “Start your free trial”. It is a method many companies use to attract and convert customers.

• Leave room for your story – Yes, there is room for your brand’s story on the landing page. Simply state how your business has helped others, and make sure that the statement is true. It will positively affect the visitor and motivate them to click on that call-to-action. Include “real” testimonials that build instant credibility and bring in a rush of new visitors to your site.

• Actively work on your blog – Beside investing in PPC ads, establish a blog with valuable information in your niche. It will help you establish a higher level of trust with those who are interested in purchasing a product from you. Use the blog to drive more organic traffic to your landing pages.

• Work on attracting the right people – Are you reaching out to the right audience? Evaluate this again and see whether you are bringing in people who are actually going to find your products useful. If you are creating content that aims to gain traffic with poor conversion rates, all your efforts go down the drain. To prevent such a situation, run surveys to tap into the pain areas of your customers and come up with blog posts that act as a solution.Targeting the wrong people will skyrocket your bounce rates.

• Actively create new landing pages and conduct tests – If you believe that you should use only a handful of landing pages, you are greatly mistaken. It is necessary to create up to 50 different landing pages to get the correct statistical data. Moreover, updating your landing pages is also crucial. If visitors are bouncing more often from web pages, there can be loopholes in your landing page that you must consider fixing. Try changing the tone, design or both. Make changes and you can track the process through Google Analytics.

Every group of landing pages should be used to measure performance with different types of marketing channels. It is the only way to receive data that will point you in the right direction. The more time passes, the better the performance will be, that is, the lower the number of bounce rates you are going to experience.

Taking the above mentioned steps is going to help you better tackle high bounce rates. It is also important to note that the whole process should also be measured. To be precise, relying on a simple project management tool and a time tracker will allow you to measure how long it takes to make changes and conduct testing. It will give you a complete insight into your ROI with every change you make.

Remember that bounce rates change periodically. There is always more room for improvement, meaning that the optimization process should be repeated periodically to ensure that bounce rates are always within the normal range.

With these basic steps, you will be able to easily fix high bounce rates. Leaving these issues unattended will cripple your business, so be sure to actively work on reducing them as much as possible.

Author Bio: David is a technical writer, his works are regularly published in various papers and top-notch portals. His rich experience in Project management domain helps him offer latest and fresh perspective on improved efficiency in work flows across organizations. His informative works on similar lines can be reached out on ProProfs Project.