Let me ask you a question. Have you ever left a web page with in minutes of arriving, because it wasn’t easy to find the information you were looking for and quickly navigate to it? I’m sure that all of us have done is once or twice. In marketing, we like to refer to this quick exit after visiting only one page as “bouncing”.
As marketers, when we are trying to measure the success of a website one of the things that we look at is bounce rate, or the percentage of individuals that visit your website and without visiting any page beyond the one that they landed on. The lower the bounce rate, the better!
So what can you do to lower the bounce rates of your website pages? One thing that we’ve found works well, a majority of the time is creating a clean page layout, with organized information that makes it easy for people to find what they are looking for and navigate to other pages on the site.
One of our clients (a film school) had historically struggled with bounce rates. So when it came time for us to redesign their homepage we wanted to make sure that wasn’t an issue anymore! One of our proposed changes was creating a drop down menu (shown below) where students could quickly navigate directly to the areas of study they are interested in.
Before we unleashed this creation on the world, we ran a 2 week long A/B test where half of the page visitors were shown the homepage with the new drop down menu and half were not. The results were overwhelming. The home page version with the drop down menu was the clear winner, it increased average page views by 23.41% and lowered bounce rate 3.82%.
The combination of the bounce rate and page view data seem to show that users were able to easily find information, quickly process it and then navigate to the areas of the site that they were interested in more easily. Overall, this emphasizes the need to have clean layouts and organization of important information.
