As a business owner or marketer, there are several key performance indicators (KPIs) you can check for your website, including web traffic, conversions, and bounce rates. Each of these can prove helpful, but is there one you should be more concerned about? What’s the relationship between these three metrics?
In this article, we’ll explore the relationship between bounce rate, website traffic, and conversion rate. We’ll do our best to provide you with actionable insights into these metrics so you can make a more informed decision about which ones to prioritize and how they coincide.
Read on to learn more!
Bounce Rate, Conversions, and Web Traffic: Related?
Many professionals like you wonder whether bounce rates, conversions, and web traffic are related. You may believe, “If I’m getting more web traffic, I should have lower bounce rates and higher conversions,” but that is not always the case!
For example, it’s entirely possible to have a ton of web traffic along with a high bounce rate. This could be due to several factors, including:
- An ad that doesn’t accurately reflect your brand
- A hyperlink that doesn’t represent the content on the page
- An outdated or slow website
- A website that’s not optimized for mobile
Other factors are actually good for you that could result in a high bounce rate but better conversions. We’ll touch on that more later. For now, let’s briefly go over what each of these metrics are and why they’re important.
Why Do Bounce Rates Matter?
A bounce rate measures the percentage of site visitors that leave (“bounce from”) the website after seeing just one page. Exit rates are similar to bounce rates, except that they measure the percentage of people who visit many pages and then leave the website after visiting a specific page.
Bounce rates matter because it’s possible that a certain page could be turning prospective clients awa, either because of poor content, broken links, or slow loading times. If you’ve got a problem with one of your web pages, you’ll want to know about it!
The Importance of Conversion Rates
A conversion rate is the percentage of actions taken after clicks on an ad or other CTA button on your website. Conversion rates can track:
- Percentage of people who sign up for your newsletter
- People who register on your site or request a demo
- The number of visitors who buy your product
To put it simply, conversions mean results!
Conversion rate is the most important metric for marketers who want to improve their bottom line since it typically has a positive impact on their financial earnings. That said, the other metrics listed can impact your conversion rates for the better, so a full-bodied approach can be helpful depending on your goals.
The Down-Low on Web Traffic
Website traffic tracks the number of visitors to a website, and how many pages they click on. This information is a good indicator of how user-friendly your website is and how much attention it’s getting. The more popular your website is, the higher the web traffic.
Generally speaking, more attention is better – but this is not always true. It’s possible to be extremely popular in the digital world and still suffer where conversions are concerned. This could be the case if a marketer or business owner is struggling to win leads with their website or lacks the proper sales funnels to facilitate conversions.
Bounce Rate vs. Conversion Rates
Richard from Astralcom has a pretty solid take when determining the most important KPI. He compares two factors, and here’s the conclusion he came to:
“Let’s look at two examples and determine which is performing the best, comparing two metrics: bounce rate against conversion rate;
- A paid keyword campaign with a 44% bounce rate and a conversion rate of 0%
- A syndicated display ad campaign with a 59% bounce rate and .11% conversion rate
“A conversion is typically the end game in website marketing, right? …Think about it. At the end of the day, isn’t the sole purpose of advertising and marketing to convert visitors?”
Another important note is that you should almost throw out the bounce rate altogether depending on the type of page you’re analyzing. Aja Frost of The Good notes that bounce rates can be misleading:
“In some cases, a high bounce rate means you’re doing something right. Take the ‘Contact Us’ page… best-case scenario? Someone will arrive, find the company’s phone number or email, and leave the site.
“In general, pages dedicated to helping people quickly resolve a problem should have higher bounce rates.
“The same holds true for conversion-focused pages. As long as your conversion rate is high, it’s okay if a percentage of visitors are leaving… in fact, that’s usually a good thing. It means you’re disqualifying people who aren’t interested in your offer.”
If your landing page has a high bounce rate, you’re probably on the right track. A good realistic bounce rate for a landing page is 70-90%, well over the general 50-70% average that most marketers say to shoot for.
Here are some other realistic bounce rates you should shoot for based on the type of page or your intention for the page/website:
- Lead gen: 30-50%
- Content sites: 40-60%
- Blogs: 70-98%
- Service websites: 10-30%
- Retail websites: 20-40%
Web Traffic vs. Conversion Rates
Web traffic and conversions are important, but you might be wondering which one to focus on first. You may think, “I should start with increasing my web traffic, then move on to conversions to get as much out of it as possible!” If that’s the case, you’d be wrong.
Meggie, a guest contributor on Aberdeen puts it this way: “They are both essential, but having many visitors doesn’t do you any good if they don’t buy your products or services. You want to make a sale so that you can earn more profit, and you can only do that by increasing your conversions.”
Neil Patel adds: “If you only focus on raising your number of visitors, you’re eventually going to hit a ceiling where you can’t bring in any more, either because you’ve reached the vast majority of people in your niche or because your niche is so large that you can’t afford to reach any of them.
“What can you do to prevent hitting this ceiling? Focus on conversions first.”
Solutions to Improve Conversion Rates
As important as conversion rates are, many businesses struggle to accept the reality that conversion rates are king. In fact, out of $92 spent to acquire customers, most businesses only spend $1. This startling statistic shows that conversion rates aren’t high enough a priority for most businesses, and it wouldn’t take much to see a major improvement in conversions.
Here’s proof: the best-performing websites have an 11% conversion rate or higher, whereas the average conversion rate is 2.35%. That may be daunting, but it doesn’t take too much of an increase in conversion rates for you to become part of the top 25%. To do that, you only need a score of 5.31% or higher! Conversion rate optimization (including A/B testing) can help you bridge the gap between your current rate and the top 25%.
Here are some of the steps you can take to improve your conversions:
- Increase your landing pages. Companies that increase their landing pages from 10-15 typically see a 55% increase in leads. Don’t have 10 landing pages? Then get started!
- Get social proof (testimonials, reviews). Across all industries, user-generated content has the ability to convert 161% more people. Even better if it’s a video – 77% of people say that video testimonials convince them to buy a product or service!
- Personalize everything, including CTAs. Personalized CTAs can convert 202% better than CTAs that are not personalized.
- Remember, less is more on forms. You can get 120% more conversions from a lead generation form by reducing the fields from 11 to four.
- Be smart about pop-ups. While some people hate pop-ups, some see them as a “necessary evil” and have no trouble clicking away if they’re not interested. The average conversion rate is 3.09%, but you can increase it by being intentional.
No Time? Let Us Redesign Your Website
We’ve only touched on some things that can help increase conversions.
Other tips to increase your conversions include:
- Revamping your CTA copy
- Adding a countdown timer
- Upselling
- Adding live chat to your website
- Simplifying the first step of the process
- Offering a money-back guarantee
- Adding a third-party signup service
- Zeroing in on your website’s goals
- Collecting and analyzing visitor information
- Testing your conversion funnel
- Becoming crystal clear about your value proposition
- Optimizing layout for your most important pages
- Following best practices with sales copy
- Simplifying site navigation
- Testing before you deploy
- Creating campaigns for abandoned carts
- Meeting expectations
- Localizing content
- And more
We’re going to be honest: it’s a lot. Fortunately, that’s what we specialize in here at Matcha Design. We’ve had decades to learn the ins and outs of marketing and how to help your website perform at its best.
If you’d rather not be the one to create a full-bodied marketing strategy or don’t have the time to overhaul your entire website, contact us! We’re happy to help reach your conversion goals.
