If you invest a lot of money in bringing people to your website you cannot be very reluctant on them leaving in no time.
Why people leave your website?
Before we dive into the bad stuff there is one thing to consider – The difference between Exit rate and Bounce rate.
An Exit Rate is specific to each page and it’s the percentage of people who leave after viewing that page. Exits may have viewed more than one page in a session. So, your exit rate tells you the last page that visitors see before they leave. High exit rates can often reveal problem areas on your site.
By contrast, Bounce Rate is the number of visitors who leave your website after visiting just one single page. The higher the bounce rate of a page, the lower the percentage of engaged users. It’s worth mentioning that while your bounce rate can be affected by the quality of your page, it can also be affected by the quality of the traffic coming to your site.
5 reasons visitors leave your website.
1) Too many ads.
Just because you need to have ads doesn’t mean they have to be everywhere.
I always tell my clients that ads should not be the first thing visitors see when they visit a web page. Let’s think for a second. Did they come for the ads or for the information (content) the search engine promised them?
Which leads me to the second most annoying thing. Don’t ever obstruct the content your visitors came for in the first place with irritating pop-ups ads. If you going to bombard the visitor with pop-ups then he is going to want to leave. Saying that I can kind of tolerate a pop-up 50-60 seconds after my arrival if the content is good. But only if the content is good.
And last but by no means least. Ads should not occupy more space than the actual content.
2) Immediate registration ultimatum.
Why? I honestly still don’t know you.
You may have guessed it straight away. This is not the perfect way of starting a relationship with your customers.
If a visitor really has to register, give them first a taste of what they are signing up for. Tease them a little bit, let them wander around free before offering them the tie. Timing is everything.
3) Uninspiring and invisible content.
When I visit a website for the first time I have to be able to tell what’s on offer within the first few seconds. It’s estimated that as much as 50% of potential clients leave a website because they can’t find what they are looking for.
Nowadays people tend to skim online, looking for the keywords and ignoring all the ‘jabber’. You content should be mellow but organised. In my opinion you have less than 4 seconds to grab your visitor’s attention, so go straight to the point in a brief but comprehensive manner.
Don’t be scared to oversell your offerings.
I accept that not everybody in this world is a good writer, but have a professional copywriter at least editing your content.
Here is the place to talk about outdated content. Keep your content fresh but on the topic. This not just going to increase the interest level in your website, but it will also increase your search engine rankings.
Blogging is a good way of giving news and updates to your customers. But a word of caution here. If you are not going to post often my advice is to hide your post date.
4) Slow Load Time
Website visitors tend to care more about page load than everything else we are throwing at them. User patience levels have been sharply decreasing over the years. Even in the long gone year 2007 Amazon tests revealed that every 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1%.
People expect sites to loads within two seconds. As simple as that. A study showed that as much as 45% of people will abandon a page if the loading time is more than 3 seconds. Not just that but more than 50% of online shoppers claim that page loading times are important for their loyalty to a site. So in simple words people are not just going to leave your website, but they may never come back again even if they were your loyal customers.
I think it’s time for you to start regularly test your web pages with Pingdom to ensure quick load speeds.
5) An Empty Coupon Field
This one is not immediately noticeable. If you are prominently displaying a coupon code field during checkout, you may find using Google Analytics that some of the keywords sending people to your website are “your store name coupons”.
But let’s imagine for a second you are the buyer. How do you react to a coupon code field?
I don’t know about you, but whenever I see an empty coupon field while shopping online, I always take some time to do a quick coupon search. While browsing for coupons, occasionally I find a better deal and never return. Or I just get so bored looking for those coupons that I never go back and complete the purchase.
The big killer here is that the customer is leaving your website at a crucial moment – just before making the final move – buying your product or service.
One possible solution would be to provide coupons right on your checkout page in order to reduce shopping cart/website abandonment. Other solution will be to remove this field all together at times when you don’t have any coupon codes outstanding.
Conclusion
The main goal of every business is to attract traffic to its website and keep it there for as long as possible. Often, we only think of what makes our company website “charming” and “cool” and we forget what our potential clients actually want to see.
Luckily, with so many case studies easily findable online we can precisely establish as to why exactly something that looks perfect is not in fact converting.
Visitors don’t come to your website thinking of abandoning it. They come looking for an answer. If this answer is not obvious it is only natural they want to move on.
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