Why people leave your website

You designed a great website, you took care over its content, you are pouring huge money into PPC campaigns to bring customers in. You see a huge audience reached, arriving at your site, and a very high percentage of people who leave the site again straight away. If someone visits one page on your site and does nothing before leaving, we call that action a bounce. The bounce rate of a website is the share of visitors who leave without taking any further action. So what is a good bounce rate? A bounce rate between 56% and 70% is high, though there may be a good reason for it. A bounce rate between 41% and 55% can be considered average. The optimal bounce rate should be in the range of 26% to 40%. But these are only average numbers and it is always worth looking at them in the context of your site's content. The differences are considerable across devices too (mobile, tablet, computer) that people visited your site from.

Taking a particular desired action on your website — a purchase, filling in a form, downloading an e-book and so on — is what we call a conversion. Conversion is the key element of your paid search strategy. If you are not actually turning viewers into buyers, why advertise? Conversion rate optimisation lets you get the most out of every cent of your PPC spend by finding the sweet spot that persuades the largest possible percentage of your prospective customers to act.

WordStream's founder, Larry Kim, compared thousands of Google Ads accounts spending 3 billion USD and found that some advertisers convert two or three times faster than the average. Across industries the average landing-page conversion rate was 2.35%, but the top 25% reach a conversion rate of 5.31% or more. Ideally, if you want to be among the top 10 accounts, then your dream number is a conversion rate of 11.45% or higher. Here too you have to take your site's layout into account. If you have excellent blog traffic and count that traffic in your e-shop's overall traffic, the conversion rate will of course go down.

We have briefly sketched two important metrics we track in PPC campaigns. Now let us take a slightly critical look together at your website, to see whether it feeds the bounce rate and lowers the conversion rate. If it has any of the shortcomings below, or several of them, not even the best PPC specialist will help you. You are paying for advertising for nothing. In the long run it will cost you less to invest more in fixing the site or building a new one.

Loading your website is for the persistent only

Are we really going to talk about page loading speed? We are. If you want to survive in the digital wilderness, your site needs to be a cheetah that is fit, not a cheetah with three legs.

Patience is persistence combined with the hope that things will improve. But how many people can afford such a luxury and be patient? And how many want to be patient? Probably not most. Your prospective customers want everything right now. You want results right now too. :)

In 2010 there were a little over 210 million websites. Today there are more than 1.8 billion, so the competition has gone up "slightly". As Kissmetrics reports, as many as 47% of users expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less. If a user who clicks your ad or your listing in search has a long load ahead of them, they will most likely go back and choose the competition. Your other advantages over the competition automatically become irrelevant, because the prospective customer will not even see them. How fast does your site load? Find out HERE

A few adjustments are enough to speed up loading — removing unnecessary plugins or shrinking large files and images. There are plenty of image compression tools online. My favourite, mainly because of the panda, is this one. People's maximum tolerance for a page load is 3 seconds, and loading speed is at the top of the user experience and matters most to them (UX — user experience).

I would sooner find information in the Bermuda Triangle than on your site

Have you ever rung your bank's customer support? And after a few minutes of listening to irritating music and a repeating voice saying "if you wish to… then press…" And how many of you gave up after a while without your request being dealt with? Online you have a similar situation, only a thousand times faster. People expect to get what they want instantly with one click. If they do not get it from you at once, they have hordes of your competitors to choose from. It follows that your site's structure should be clear, well arranged, logical and predictable, because users are used to certain standards. Simple navigation on a site supports the user's positive perception of it.

And let us not forget hierarchy. Set the website up so that visitors naturally move to the most important parts.

With clients too we often see websites that are genuinely beautiful at first sight, containing huge images, videos and animations, but in the end their sites do not serve their purpose. If your aim is for people to fill in a form, they need to find it easily and it should be reachable from every part of the site. If you want to sell, products have to be logically arranged and visible.

Design

Do you like your site's design? Great! And does your target group like it too? You will design a different site for gardeners, a different one for beauticians and a different one for banking products. Design matters. It is not only about colour, trendiness or various interactive elements. Consistency matters too — a unified look and feel across the whole website.

Trustworthiness

Apparently more than 46% of website visitors often consider website design the most important criterion for judging a business's trustworthiness. An out-of-date design can create distrust in your brand, because people think your product and services are no longer relevant. So although keeping a website's design current may seem a costly investment, it is in fact a necessary expense for further growth in visitors and online sales. A good rule is to consider refreshing your website's design every five years so as to stay current and keep things up to standard.

In a study, the psychologist and researcher Dr Elizabeth Sillence asked participants to review websites on the subject of hypertension and then rate whether they trusted or distrusted the site. Surprisingly, she found that 94% of cautious respondents were troubled by the website's design specifically. So if your site still looks as though it was made in the 1990s, it is time for a professional facelift.

Predictability and simplicity

22% of consumers visiting a website for the first time look for engaging colours. But 21% of consumers leave a site with "unusual" colours. (Top Design Firms, 2021) Use elements and designs people know — you do not have to reinvent the wheel. Get rid of unnecessary design elements and make your website comprehensible.

SSL certificate

If we mentioned trustworthiness, then verifying the URL will certainly contribute to your site's credibility. In a British study 64% of users said they would leave a site immediately if they saw a "not secure" warning. To avoid putting customers off and to make sure all the information users enter on your site stays secure, update your website to the HTTPS protocol.

Your content is hard to read, dull, too short or too long

The typeface you use, along with the text and background colours, can determine how easily people can read and enjoy the content on your site. There are no hard rules dictating which typeface to use and which to avoid. As for font size, stick to larger fonts to give visitors a better experience whether they are on a computer or using a mobile device. For headings use a font size of 22 px or larger. For body text stick to 14 px or larger.

Your product's benefits are not clear. If you do not clearly share your product's features with customers on your website, you certainly will not get them to move down the sales funnel.

Example:

Call to action

Do not be afraid to tell users what you expect of them. If you want them to buy your products, your blog posts should contain those calls and links to products too. If you want people to like you on social media, ask them to. The call to action and its wording matter enormously. Not even your partner can read your mind, so you cannot expect it of your customers.

What do your shopping basket and registration form look like?

You caught people's interest with your product or service and they want to order and buy. All that separates them from the order is the number of questions they have to answer in forms.

As for forms, ideally they should be as brief as possible. And it helps if they also explain why you need each piece of information. So ask yourself with every field you add to a form whether it really has to be there. If you find it hard to cut anything, remember that Expedia earned an extra 12 million dollars in one year by removing a single data field. You can run A/B tests to find the optimal form length.

If we look at shopping baskets, online shoppers often reach the checkout page and leave without completing the purchase. They are put off by needless registration, a drawn-out checkout, missing discount options, a lack of payment methods, or various technical problems and faults.

The website does not get on with mobile devices

Some sources report that as many as 60% of visits are made by users on mobiles. This is precisely why your site should be responsive. If your website is not adapted to mobile devices, your mobile users will probably be frustrated and leave. Make sure your site offers a good user experience for mobile users, including responsive design, easily tappable buttons, mobile-friendly navigation, smaller file sizes and simplified forms.

If you have a site that is clear, concise and has a visually appealing design together with well-crafted content, relevant links and simple navigation, you give the visitor a positive experience that may help persuade them to stay.