My daughter in mid-wail
What do crying babies and your website visitors have in common with one another? A lot more than you think.
Being the mother of a newborn infant (two months old this past Saturday), crying is something I’ve been learning about. Babies are not able to communicate with words yet, so they cry to tell you something is wrong. Visitors to your website don’t cry (at least not that you know of), but they do something else; they leave your website.
When a baby cries you try to understand what they are asking for – are they hungry, do they need to be changed, do they have gas in their tummy? You can go through each of these options (and more) to try and remedy the problem until you find the solution. Unfortunately you can’t do that with a website visitor, once they are gone, they’re usually gone for good.
This is why it’s so important to understand patterns and behaviours of visitors to your site and to try and identify why people are leaving the site and fix it before they leave. Previously, I wrote a post encouraging you to look at your fall out reports available to you from your web analytics software as it can tell you valuable information. This report can be very helpful if you know what you’re looking for and if visitors are going more than one page deep in your site, or are using some sort of registration.
But what if they aren’t? What if visitors aren’t getting past your front door? They come to your site, but leave right away? What do you do? Like a crying baby they can’t tell you why they are leaving – so how do you know?
Here’s a few simple questions you can ask yourself about your website to see if you’re able to change the bounce rate of your site.
Look to see where visitors are coming from
If they are coming from search engines, what keyword is it they arrived on, this will give you a clue as to what kinds of information they were expecting to find. If it is wasn’t as a result of organic search, then what site was it? What likely made them visit your site?
How easy is it to find what they are looking for?
Now that you know where your visitors came from and what they might be looking for, ask yourself if your site caters to their needs? Can you easily find the information they might have been looking for in eight seconds or less?. If you answer no to this question, you need to seriously consider the content and layout of your site.
Is your call to action apparent and easy to follow?
What is the number one thing you want a visitor to your site to do? Do you gently guide them towards that path without any other obstacles in their way? Or do you potentially overwhelm them by giving them too much choice and too many options? Is your call to action clear, concise and most importantly – above the fold and enticing enough to make your visitors take that action, not now, but right now?
We all lead busy lives, it’s easy to start a task and abandon it halfway because the baby started crying, or the boss asked you to drop everything you were doing for another project. So make sure your website is designed to make it easy for people in these situations to find and finish whatever it is you want them to do so they can go on their merry way.
Rebecca Atkinson (Muller) is a freelance web marketing/analytics consultant with more than seven years of direct experience helping businesses create and implement online marketing and communications strategies. Her clients come from all industries including finance, technology and not-for-profit. She specializes in helping her clients determine how to improve their advertising programs, focusing on visitor behaviour – beyond the inital click-through. Full bio available
First of all, Congrats Rebecca on moving to your new domain and bravo on the migration! As someone who been through the same thing, I know it’s definitely a celebration here!
I enjoyed this post a lot. It speaks for many of us here about how we always wanted to keep our visitors, how to increase our traffic and such. By going to the ’source’ of all, we get to know the behaviors and what they really want from our sites. I certainly need to dig more into Analytics instead of just writing blindly.
It’s a great come back post! Worth a stumble — especially having your adorable MJ in it too!
@wchingya
Social/Blogging Tracker
Thanks Ching Ya! It feels good to be moved and have (almost) all the housekeeping done. I’d wanted to get it done much earlier but alas baby MJ had other plans for me. Glad you enjoyed it. You write blindly? Ha, you provide so much good info in your posts that it can’t be considered writing blindly.