There could be many reasons for decreasing conversions and low click-through rates. In this blog, we’ll concentrate on three common scenarios that might be causing issues, regardless of your industry.

i. Form flow woes: You have a multi-field form to generate leads, but it’s not performing well and falling short of achieving the business objective of lead generation.

ii. Engagement deficit: Your content isn’t engaging and converting visitors to leads.

iii. Navigation flaws: Users struggle to find products from your navigation menu that has multiple categories.

Before making alterations to the current user experience or launching A/B tests to address these issues, it’s crucial to have a precise understanding of what’s going wrong. The figures derived from a web analytics tool merely serve as symptoms; uncovering the root cause of the problem involves delving into the user experience when they decide not to convert. This is precisely where a behavior analytics tool proves to be invaluable.

So, how can a comprehensive tool like VWO Insights-Web with vast application assist in tackling these three challenges? Let’s delve into it with the help of three case studies featuring high-growth businesses that successfully overcame these issues using the tool.

Note: Here’s a guide for you to refer to when you come across various features of VWO Insights-Web in this blog. It provides details of how these VWO features work cohesively for behavior analysis.

Success stories: How brands harness VWO Insights-Web to transform challenges into triumphs

Qualicorp discovered a form-filling conundrum: Indistinct field names

Qualicorp, a healthcare organization based in Brazil, aimed to enhance lead generation and boost conversions on their health insurance plans page. However, the page was underperforming. Enter VWO Form Analytics from VWO Insights-Web, which proved instrumental in analyzing the user experience.

The form analytics features provided valuable insights into user pain points, tracking metrics such as hesitation rate, ragged clicks, dead clicks, completion time, completion rate, and more. Upon analysis, it became evident that one of the factors contributing to the low form-fill rate was the need for discernible field names during the form-filling process. This, in turn, resulted in fewer users making it to the health insurance plans page.

In response to this insight, Qualicorp implemented an A/B test featuring a new design. The results were impressive, with the new design boosting the conversion rate by a substantial 16.93% in the primary goal.

Read the full case study.

Encyclopedia Britannica Group found blue to be the most engaging link color

The Encyclopedia Britannica Group, a venerable institution with over 250 years of global knowledge leadership, strives to ignite curiosity and enhance engagement with its content to cultivate a robust user base and drive subscriptions.

To optimize their approach, the marketing team at the group employed A/B testing through VWO Testing, experimenting with three colors—red, orange, and blue (control)—for in-line article links, coupled with calls to action, to determine the most effective option. Subsequently, the team utilized VWO Session Recordings to delve into click behavior, and mouse flow in order to see how users perceived these different colors. 

During this analysis, a noteworthy observation emerged: many users attempted to click on words highlighted in blue, even though these words weren’t actual links. Recognizing this user behavior, the team decided to keep the blue color for the actual links, resulting in a remarkable 10% improvement in their click-through rate. 

Additionally, the team harnessed VWO On-Page Survey capability to uncover the most pressing inquiries users had about the topic. Armed with this valuable insight, the company took proactive steps by designing an accordion feature on its website, showcasing the top Q&As derived from the survey for each article. The outcome was impressive, with over 23% of users engaging with the accordion to access answers to their questions.

Read the full case study.

Shopclues improved the product searching process on the navigation bar by focusing on user feedback

Shopclues, a prominent e-commerce player in India catering to 42 million visitors, took a strategic approach to enhance its Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) initiatives. In a meticulous analysis of each element, the focus was on tracking conversion signals. The tool of choice for this endeavor was VWO Insights -Web, utilized to delve into user behavior on the category page.

Through VWO Heatmap analysis, it became evident that filters such as “new arrivals,” “best selling,” and “price sorting” were capturing the majority of user attention. Users had to navigate by clicking on these filters and then sifting through products to find what they were looking for.

To streamline this process, Shopclues’ CRO team leveraged VWO On-Page Surveys to directly gather feedback from visitors regarding these filters. Armed with valuable insights, a variation was crafted that eliminated the extra step for users. This new approach presented visitors with products matching their chosen filters right away in a horizontal display in the navigation.

The new top navigation bar delivered 50% more CTR. Not only did the improvement in visits-to-order (48% from the category page) translate to higher revenue, but it also improved the quality of visits.

Read the full case study.

These three case studies serve as compelling illustrations of how VWO Insights-Web proves to be a valuable tool in addressing common challenges across diverse industries. It excels in pinpointing the root causes behind low conversion rates, showcasing the versatility and effectiveness of this solution.

And does VWO Insights-Web stop here? Not at all; there’s more to explore and leverage.

Beyond optimization: VWO keeps a watchful eye on your user experience

Imagine you’ve honed your user experience using data from VWO Insights-Web or another tool, implementing a series of optimization campaigns over a quarter. As the quarter concludes, assessing the performance of these optimizations becomes crucial. How do you go about it? Well, VWO provides a solution – the Insights Dashboard. 

This tool empowers you to effortlessly track and analyze the effectiveness of your optimizations. The dashboard offers a comprehensive view, shedding light on friction points and experience scores derived from user satisfaction, delivering valuable insights into the performance of your enhancements.

Notably, you can easily identify pages with low scores and validate the reasons using heatmaps and scrollmaps. Furthermore, pinpointing visitor segments with low experience scores allows you to tailor customized plans for these segments.

This is just one application 

The dashboard is also invaluable in the early phases of behavior research, providing insights into friction points contributing to low conversion rates. 

Thus VWO Insights-Web provides comprehensive and versatile solutions throughout the entire lifecycle of website enhancement and optimization efforts. Let’s see what some of our clients have to say about the tool. 

Rave reviews: What users are saying about VWO Insights-Web

In conclusion

VWO Insights-Web is a tool that enables proactive and continuous monitoring of your website experience score. It empowers you to identify issues using features like heatmaps, session recordings, on-page surveys, and form analytics for low-performing pages and visitor segments. Once you formulate a hypothesis, you can seamlessly run an A/B test from the same platform and subsequently track the experience score. This makes it a one-stop shop for the entire experience optimization process.

So, if you’re ready to give it a try, here’s an all-inclusive 30-day free trial of VWO. It encompasses all the capabilities and features that will assist you in making informed business decisions when choosing an optimization tool.

No, they don’t wave a magic wand to score successes.

Among the strategies they employ, a common thread is placing customers at the core of everything they do. It all begins with tuning in and understanding how audiences navigate their websites and engage with their brands. And this naturally leads them to leverage behavioral analytics.

While anyone in an organization can explore visitor behavior, certain professionals absolutely need to delve into it because their work is rooted in deriving valuable insights from such analyses. And when they become pals with behavior analytics tools, they can do justice to the work they do. 

Product managers convert insights from visitor behavior into actionable steps for the development team to create features that visitors love.

Next, we have the marketers who identify conversion roadblocks and optimize them to maximize the return on marketing investments through behavior analysis.

Lastly, UX professionals leverage behavior analytics to craft intuitive, frictionless website journeys, addressing visitors’ pain points and needs. 

Their use cases may vary, but they recognize the value of analyzing visitor behavior for their company’s success. 

Continue reading to know in detail how each of these personas can benefit from using behavior analytics.

How Product Managers benefit from behavior analytics

Product managers are responsible for recognizing customer needs and improving the product, either by enhancing existing features or introducing new ones. It’s not just about meeting customer needs; they also make sure these improvements help achieve the overall goals of the business. 

They act as a link between customers and the development team, turning feedback into practical plans. This entire exercise requires a solid understanding of how visitors behave on their websites – indicating a lot about their needs, expectations, pain points, and aspirations. 

Prioritize features that users want

Wondering if your product has peaked and reached its best version? Well, that might not be the case. Visitor needs are ever-evolving, and it’s essential to stay tuned to their preferences. Some innovative ideas arise from their needs, ones you might not have considered. In such cases, using behavior analytics tools like surveys allows you to directly understand what they’re looking for.

But it’s not always a straightforward conversation. Sometimes, you have to observe their actions, pick up on subtle cues, and figure out how to enhance their website journey without them explicitly stating it. This is where tools like heatmaps and session recordings prove invaluable. 

Hot red colors on heatmaps indicate high engagement, while cool blue colors show low engagement. On the other hand, session recordings offer a comprehensive view of visitors in action—revealing where they pause, what they click, and more. This way, these tools help uncover the challenges visitors face, providing product managers with opportunities to create new features that align with evolving needs.

Increase feature adoption

Introducing cool features is fantastic, but the real magic happens when our visitors actively engage with them, doesn’t it? Now, how do we gauge their usage? Heatmaps and recordings step in to showcase how smoothly audiences interact with the new features. 

Let’s say you’re a product manager at a gaming company, and you want to see the audience’s reaction to a new feature showing interactive gaming tutorials and walkthroughs. By tuning into insights from visitor behavior, as unveiled by these tools, you can effectively assess how players are responding to the feature.

Are the heatmaps indicating less engagement in this area? Do recordings reveal that not many visitors are interacting with these tutorials? Delving deep into their behavior will help you determine at what stage of engagement the visitors are with your new product feature. This allows you to refine visitor experiences, encouraging them to embrace the feature with ease. 

Expedite bug fixes

Imagine you have a website selling various products, and customers often encounter broken links when trying out a new feature, such as viewing a product in a 3D setting on the product page. That’s a bug, and they happen in software. But the quicker these bugs are fixed, the happier users are. Swift bug resolution is essential for maintaining a seamless user experience. 

Behavioral analytics tools, such as session recordings and surveys, offer a proactive approach to bug detection and resolution. Suppose, when you observe in a recording that visitors are clicking the link and it shows as broken, it indicates a friction in their journey. This way, you know where the problem is, and you can take quick action. By leveraging these tools, product managers can promptly identify and prioritize fixing critical bugs, ensuring a more stable and reliable product for users.

Decrease support tickets

While efficient customer support is crucial, we should ensure that our product is so finely tuned from the get-go that our visitors face little to no problems to begin with. Consider a travel booking website where users occasionally encounter hiccups in the flight search process, leading to a surge in support tickets. 

Now, through heatmaps and surveys, the product manager gains a sneak peek into visitors’ sentiments and pain points during the booking journey. This way, they can proactively tackle specific challenges, like fine-tuning the search filters. This not only elevates the booking experience but also naturally reduces the number of support tickets, ensuring a smoother journey for visitors planning their trips right from the start.

A product manager’s strategy is rooted in creating a product that is intuitively designed, motivating visitors to make the most of the new features. Incorporating intuitive guides and tooltips within the product can preemptively assist visitors, reducing the likelihood of queries and support ticket submissions.

How Marketers benefit from behavior analytics

In today’s era where data fuels business growth, marketers zero in on a data-driven approach for sustained business growth. Hence, by investigating visitor behavior on websites, they uncover optimization opportunities and implement effective strategies. In doing so, they ensure maximum conversions from website traffic, contributing to businesses’ returns on marketing investments.

Reverse low conversions

The role of a CRO marketer is to decipher why website visitors may slip through the cracks without completing desired actions. Are there any friction points hindering them from following the expected conversion route? Heatmaps and session recordings shed light on visitor behavior, unveiling areas causing confusion or disinterest. By addressing these pain points, you can effectively reverse the trend of low conversions.

Let’s consider a scenario where your heatmap reveals a lack of engagement with the primary CTA button on your website. After adjusting its placement and design based on insights from session recordings, you’ll likely observe an increase in conversions.

Note: Qualitative research reveals the ‘why’ behind visitor behavior, explaining why visitors act a certain way on a website. However, before delving into qualitative insights, quantitative research provides the ‘what’ – identifying specific issues on the website. 

Once quantitative research uncovers problems like drop-offs and declining average page sessions, qualitative research comes into play to understand why visitors exhibit certain behaviors causing these issues. In all these scenarios, personas either proactively dive into behavior analytics to stay ahead of visitor behavior or turn to qualitative research after identifying problems in quantitative research (using tools like Google Analytics 4) for in-depth analyses.

Discover engagement gaps

Websites serve as intricate canvases, capturing the ebb and flow of visitor interactions. Ever noticed those quiet corners or pages where visitor engagement seems to dim? CRO marketers pinpoint and revive these areas of potential disengagement.

How’s that possible? By turning to behavioral analytics. Heatmaps highlight areas with low and high engagement, offering a detailed map of user activity. Meanwhile, session recordings delve into the subtle nuances of visitor disengagement, providing a playback of their journey on the website. Armed with this insightful palette, you can strategically enhance specific sections, improving the overall experience.

Consider a scenario where a clickmap signals low interaction with a crucial product description. By delving into the related session recordings, you hypothesize that bringing it above the fold could enhance visitor engagement, offering them maximum information for their purchase decision. Strategic adjustments like these demonstrate how marketers can effectively leverage insights to bridge engagement gaps and drive results.

Segment for personalization

Embracing a one-size-fits-all approach can spell disaster for any website’s conversion rates. Instead, you should uncover the unique behaviors within diverse visitor groups and tailor experiences to align with their preferences. To achieve this, employing a behavior analytics tool like VWO becomes essential—it allows you to delve into specific segments for personalizing experiences. 

For example, simply choose the segment you want to see the session recording for and create a targeted view of a specific page. Additionally, with advanced filters, you can gain insights into how various segments engage with forms and on-page surveys on your website. This wealth of information becomes the foundation for building your personalization strategy.

Suppose you apply a filter to form responses and observe that new visitors show the highest drop-off from your services website. You can brainstorm creative solutions such as introducing complementary offers or discounts to incentivize this specific visitor group to complete form submissions. By adapting your approach based on these insights, you tap into the power of personalization for improved conversion outcomes.

Refine messaging

Do you know what’s the best way to strike a chord with your website visitors? Talk the language your visitors really want to hear. It’s all about paying attention to how visitors behave on your website and tweaking your messages accordingly. 

And you can probably guess what helps you in this case? Yes, behavior analytics. Let’s say you have a real estate website, and you see on GA4 that visitors from urban areas are spending more time on modern condo listings than suburban homes. When asked through surveys what exactly they are looking for, you get to know visitors want to see more benefits of booking condos on your website. 

You can refine your messages on those condo pages, highlighting the verified sellers, affordable pricing, and perhaps emphasizing the nearby trendy spots. It’s like customizing your property listings based on what urban dwellers are truly seeking. Hence, behavior analytics empowers you to craft messages that resonate with potential buyers. 

Watch our webinar to discover how to write copies that solve visitors’ pain points and improve conversions. 

How UX Professionals benefit from behavior analytics

UX professionals play a crucial role in shaping how visitors experience a website. Starting with UX researchers, their responsibility is to deeply understand the needs, behaviors, and preferences of visitors. With these insights, UX designers create user-centric interfaces that are intuitive, visually appealing, and aligned with user needs. 

Throughout this journey, behavioral analytics serves as a valuable companion, supporting them every step of the way. This data-driven research and design approach ensures that decisions are well-informed, making the overall visitor experience effective. 

Uncover navigation bottlenecks

A visitor-friendly navigation structure isn’t just a fancy improvement. It can boost product or information findability by 72%. This is supposed to have a positive impact on the overall visitor experience. The key lies in employing behavior analytics tools to keep a close eye on how visitors interact with your website.

For example, imagine discovering through clickmaps that visitors are frequently clicking on a non-clickable element, clearly indicated by a conspicuous red color on your website. Concurrently, session recordings show instances of rage clicks followed by a subsequent drop-off. Based on these insights, your UX team can proactively address the challenge, delving into strategies to enhance navigation and ensure a smoother user journey on your website.

Expedite research with visual data

Trends are fleeting, and visitor preferences evolve rapidly. Therefore, the ability to promptly make well-informed decisions that align with current audience desires is crucial. 

Behavior analytics provides an immediate and comprehensive overview of visitors interactions on your platform, accelerating your research and design executions. For instance, imagine you manage a learning platform and observe through visual insights from heatmaps and session recordings that students tend to skip lengthy lecture recordings. 

To delve into the reasons behind this behavior, you initiate quick and focused surveys, efficiently collecting user opinions. The feedback indicates a desire for quizzes and community discussions in addition to traditional lectures, revealing the pulse of your visitors’ preferences.

Make targeted improvements

Understanding the unique needs of diverse user segments is crucial for tailored improvements. Behavioral analytics tools allow us to investigate and enhance the experience for specific visitor groups. 

Let’s say your UX team notices through qualitative research that mobile visitors often struggle with the checkout process on your eCommerce site. So, armed with these insights, your UX team optimizes the checkout flow, making it simpler for this segment to complete the purchase, ultimately enhancing their overall shopping experience.

Sounds like a hassle? If you’re thinking of skipping, remember the fact that personalization helps companies get 40% more revenue than those that don’t. This should motivate you to have your UX teams trained on behavior analytics if you have not already. 

Validate designs with user feedback

When a UI matches a visitor’s mental model, it feels intuitive and reduces the cognitive load on visitors. It aligns with their expectations, making it easier for them to navigate and interact with the interface seamlessly.

That’s why validating your UI with visitor feedback tells you that you are on the right track. Behavior analytics, like heatmaps and session recordings, play a critical role in understanding how users interact with the UI.

Consider a scenario where a UX team is working on the mobile version of a banking website. An increase in premature drop-offs as shown in Google Analytics tells you to identify potential friction points. Session recordings reveal users struggling to find the transaction history. Surveys further confirm that users expect the transaction history to be more prominently placed on the home screen. Subsequently, the UX team redesigned the layout to align with users’ mental models, resulting in a more intuitive and user-friendly interface. 

If you’re eager to contribute to your company’s growth through visitor research, our blog will guide you on how you can make a meaningful impact within your role. We’ve discussed examples to justify the perks of behavioral analytics – and guess what? It works in almost every industry! 

Just make sure to follow best practices, starting with quantitative research to identify problem areas. Then, move to qualitative analysis, document your learnings, and set the right goals you want to achieve based on the insights gained from visitor behavior. 

So, let’s say you have hands-on visitor insights, but you’re unsure whether you need them to reverse conversions or bridge engagement. In such cases, it might make little sense, and you could inadvertently encroach into another persona’s work territory

VWO Insights – Web: The go-to behavior analytics tool for businesses

VWO Insights – Web has always been at the forefront of visitor behavior analytics, providing businesses with profound insights into their websites. Recently, its power has doubled with the launch of the Insights dashboard, bringing your website’s overall engagement performance report to your fingertips. Now, you can view page-level heatmaps, session recordings, segments with the lowest user experience, and more.

And you know what else? We’ve integrated AI into surveys that generate questions for your surveys until you’re satisfied with the output. You also receive summarized survey responses with key insights, actionable for easy implementation of optimization ideas. To witness all these features in action, try a free trial with VWO. So, get ready to experience its magic and unveil more visitor insights than you could ever imagine. 

One of Google’s most useful products is its location service, Google Maps. Let alone billions of people worldwide using it to get from point A to point B, the operation of businesses like Uber and Lyft completely rely upon Google’s location service. 

Google Maps tracks and stores data on literally every step you take, if the location services or GPS is enabled on the device. This location history data can then be used to visualize the number of location points and pins you visit over a period of time. The heatmap thus generated is referred to as a Google Maps Heatmap. 

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Create your own Google Maps heatmap in 3 simple steps

It is fairly simple to overlay your own Google Maps heatmap as there are many APIs and tools available on the internet that you can use to generate this type of heatmap.

These tools use the location history saved on Google’s cloud from your Google account and help create a heatmap of literally every place and location visited by a user. 

Here is how to create a Google Maps heatmap of your location history data using a tool called Location History Visualizer:

Step 1: Select data to be included

Head to Google Takeout to download your location history data. The Google Takeout page has a list of data that you can choose to export. On the page, deselect all then scroll down and select ‘Location History.’

After selecting ‘Location History,’ scroll to the bottom of the page and click next. After clicking next, you will be taken to the second step.

Step 2: Download data

In the second step, Google Takeout allows you to configure the delivery method, file type & size, and frequency.

After configuring the delivery method, file type & size, and frequency, click on ‘Create Export.’ Google Takeout will then process your Google Maps data and create an export. The time taken to create the export depends on the amount of data involved – it usually takes seconds but can take longer if exporting more data. Google Takeout sends an email to the corresponding Google account as soon as the export creation is completed.

Once the export is created, click on the download button. A zipped file will be downloaded to your device.

Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide

Step 3: Leverage location history visualizer, and voilà!

There are many free heatmap generators online, one of which is Location History Visualizer. Unzip the downloaded zipped file and open the folder named ‘Location History.’ Drag and drop the JSON file in the folder onto Location History Visualizer’s free-to-use heatmap generator. 

Location History Visualizer will take time to create your Google Maps heatmap based on the intensity of data points it has to plot – the higher the intensity, the longer it takes. And without any technical to-and-fro, a heatmap of your entire location history will be on your screen, with all the data points on a map. The heatmap generated looks something like the heatmap below:

Heatmaps: powerful, not just interesting

Heatmaps are a powerful way to visualize data that would otherwise be difficult to interpret or gain insight from. They can be interesting on a personal level as the above Location History example shows and can also be used in a business context to learn from your customers and website traffic. VWO Heatmaps can help your business drive more sales by understanding how website visitors are behaving on your website and optimizing to increase conversion rates.

Watch the video to learn more about heatmaps and heatmap reports:

FAQs on Google Maps Heatmap

Download Free: Cart Abandonment Guide

If the bounce on your eCommerce site is above this number, you should go through these 14 best practices to increase engagement by A/B testing most of the elements on the website as discussed below.

1) Pay Attention to the Size of the Search Bar

One reason for the high eCommerce bounce rate is that visitors are not able to find what they are looking for. To combat this problem, you have to make your search bar as prominent as possible. As per UX Planet, an ideal search box should be 27-character wide. However, search bars on average are only 18-character-wide. Though you can type long queries in short boxes, the problem is that only a portion of the query will be visible at a time. This makes editing or reviewing the query difficult.

If you can’t devote so much prime real estate to your search bar, you can try making it dynamic like AllRecipes.com. The search box automatically becomes bigger as one starts typing in the box. Another way to optimize your search bar is to make it persistent (or ‘sticky’) like Shopstyle UK. Fix it at the top of the page so that visitors who scroll down the page never lose sight of it.

2) Have a Strong Site-Search Solution

Having an ideal-length search box will not be enough if it doesn’t show up the right results. If you’ve never really considered how site search might be affecting your site experience, then now is the time to do it.

3) Speed is King

A website that loads at a lethargic pace is what one calls a bounce paradise. For every extra second, your web pages take to load, your conversions can drop.

Decibel Insight’s research on page load time and bounce rate says that slow loaders have a 72% higher bounce rate than fast loaders, and a 38% higher bounce rate than medium loaders. A fast-loading site also scores high on search rankings. Site speed is critical and you should take all possible steps to make yours faster. Here’s a link to Google’s best practices to reduce loading time.

4) Split Test the Timing of Your Modal Box

Imagine you have just entered an apparel store. You are walking at your own unhurried pace when suddenly a burly man runs into you with a feedback form. He asks you what you like in the store, what would make you come back, whether would you recommend the store to a friend, or if would you like to receive their yearly membership card. How would you react? If you possess infinite patience, you might just politely ask him to give you some breathing space — but not before mentally pledging not to enter the store again!

Now think of online shopping and modal boxes. Those theatrical pop-ups are a lot like that burly salesman. However, I won’t completely disregard modal boxes. They can be extremely useful in increasing conversions. The key lies in figuring out how long you should wait before making them pop open. If they pop up too early, you risk strangling the visitor. The time it for a little too late, and the visitor is already off to another tab. Solution? A/B test the popup timing.

5) Display the Top Deals/Discounts/Limited Time Offers

Play the urgency card to get the visitors hooked. Scarcity has been identified as one of the six persuasion principles by Robert Cialdini in his epic book on influence. One way to engage visitors on the homepage is by displaying your best deals and discounts in the banner. See how eBags prominently displays its limited-time offer in the top banner.

Limited-time discounts catch eyeballs and you will be doing yourself a great injustice if you don’t utilize them to hook the visitors.

6) Eliminate Distractions

Too many choices often confuse people and impair action. Let there be no bombardment of information on your homepage. Simplify your design and work towards reducing distractions. Inside Buzz, a VWO customer used A/B testing to create a homepage with reduced options. The simplified version increased site engagement by 17.8%.

7) Offer a Live Chat Help

While enhanced product findability and an exhaustive help section will resolve a lot of customer queries, having a 24-hour live chat feature is an even bigger boost. Visitors might get stuck at places you didn’t take into account or they might have questions you never thought existed.

Installing a live chat widget can go a long way in taking care of bounce. A well-trained customer executive not only resolves the query of the prospect but engages them till they get convinced about making the purchase. There are a few smart chat widgets that intuitively pop open when they figure out that a customer might be lost — depending on how they are behaving on a page. The next 3 best practices are specifically for product pages:

8) Let the CTA Stand Out

If the visitors are landing directly on your product pages, it’s important that they easily identify a call to action (CTA) button to get to the next stage of the funnel. Without a prominent CTA, the visitor will feel stranded and may want to leave. RIPT Apparel, a VWO customer, saw a 6.3% increase in sales after it made its CTA stand out against the backdrop.

Download Free: Cart Abandonment Guide

9) Give them the option to Engage Further

It might be the case that the prospect is not yet ready to make a purchase and needs more convincing. In that case, having just a prominent CTA on the product page won’t cut. You have to feed them with extra information by providing links to product manuals, guides, and customer reviews. But make sure there’s a ‘Buy Now’ CTA on all these new links you are making open. The idea is to keep the visitor on the site long enough to make the sale.

10) Turn off Auto-Play

So you have got product videos made and uploaded them on all the product pages to grab a pie of the rich online video market? Great. After all, videos have proven to increase conversions for Zappos and many other companies. But beware my friend. In your jest to increase conversions, don’t annoy the prospects by thrusting a video on their face. Don’t auto-play the videos. Please. Just count how many tabs are open in your browser right now. I bet it’s more than 10. (And if it’s any less, I feel you live a truly blessed life). So coming back to auto-play, it can often be annoying when a robotic voice starts reading a script from a tab you can’t identify (actually now you can — Thanks Google).  But seriously, auto-play is one of the easiest ways to make someone run away.

The next 4 best practices are design related:

11) Navigation should be a Cakewalk

Good navigation requires intuitively finding out how a visitor will search for a particular product. Create a sitemap and provide its link in bold on the homepage. Design a clear navigation menu and place it where visitors automatically look for them — horizontally on top or vertically on left. One position might work better for you than the other. So you should test the placement. The left menu worked better for one of our eCommerce clients when they ran a split test. You could also think about testing bottom navigation for mobile devices.

12) Make Sure the Ads are Not Intrusive

If you have ads running on your website, try and place them in the least intrusive position. Nothing makes visitors want to run away from your website more than when an ad pops over a piece they are trying to read or some product they are checking out. Make sure you are NOT placing the ads where visitors automatically look for information – menu bar, search box or content area. Here’s an excellent post on poorly placed internal ads.

13) Good Design Instills Credibility

The design here is not exactly pleasing to the eyes

‘Don’t judge a book by its cover might be the popular adage. But when it comes to websites, visitors do judge them by their design. Design plays a big role in influencing people’s perception of a website’s credibility. A good design automatically makes sure you are taken seriously while a bad design breeds distrust. Try to invest in a neat and uncluttered design. Consistency in terms of fonts, colors, and layout is extremely important.

14) Invest in a Responsive Design

Your visitors will be accessing your site either from a laptop, tablet, or smartphone or sometimes use all three devices at different stages of the funnel. Responsive web design provides an optimal viewing experience across different browsers and devices. It ensures the layout is resized so that the text and images don’t break.

Go to Google Analytics and check how much of your traffic comes from tablets and mobile. You should invest in a responsive design even if it’s a nominal percentage compared to your total visitors. Why you ask? Because mobile is the way to go. eCommerce sales from mobiles have been growing at 15% year on year.

The Bounce Arsenal

I would like to create a little list of weapons to combat bounce. Help me with a few suggestions. Tell me what has worked for you in your fight against bounce or what you think might work. I will be glad and all that.

Also, here’s something extra to help you. eCommerce optimization secrets from Craig Smith himself.

Note: We originally had the screenshot of LingsCars.com as an example of a bad design under Point Number 13. Though we still feel there’s scope for improvement on that front, we took the image down since they are widely successful and the design is probably working for them. 

It is a number that tells what percentage of visitors leave your site after browsing just one page or within the first 10 seconds (the exact definition depends on the web analytics tool you use). The higher the bounce rate, the higher the number of potential customers you lose because bounced visitors think your website has nothing to offer them and leave without any further interaction. With ever-reducing attention spans and ever-expanding options online, your visitors have very little motivation to actively explore your website for what you offer and how it benefits their day-to-day lives. So, it becomes the responsibility of the first page a visitor lands on to convince him that spending time here is worth it.

Download Free: Grow Website Traffic Guide

Optimizing (reducing) bounce rate is thus tremendously important to your business. There are multiple reasons why visitors leave immediately after arriving; the most prominent amongst them being:

1. Expectation mismatch: Your visitors are expecting to see something on your website while your page talks about something else. This happens often, especially when you have paid advertising for a specific offer and you link that advertisement to a generic page such as your homepage. Matching the expectations of your visitor is very important. Your site might be talking about multiple different things, but a visitor arrives on it to learn more about what the source said you offer.
2. Organic search irrelevance: Search engines are getting incrementally better at finding relevant content for a user search query, but they are still not perfect. I’m sure while reviewing your web analytics reports, you must be regularly surprised by: ‘How come this search query found this page on my website? Your visitors too feel the same. Try comparing your bounce rate for organic visitors (those who came via search engines) versus non-organic visitors (those who came via other sources); you will see that the former metric is higher than the latter.
3. Your website sucks: Your visitors expect a visually appealing, easy-on-the-eyes website upon arrival. They are already sick of advertisement-loaded, poorly made websites all over the Internet and if yours is no better, they won’t be very happy about it. Give your visitors a pleasant surprise by having a website with the right contrast, the right typography, the right layout, and the right color scheme. Hire a top-notch designer and pay them whatever you can but please make sure your website looks good.
4. Lack of call to action: Well-designed and drafted Call-To-Action (CTA) banners can make a huge difference in conversion rate. Missing or badly designed CTAs perhaps be the single biggest reason why visitors bounce from your website. Once visitors have gone through the page they landed on, don’t let them struggle with what they should be doing next. Guide them to the actions that you think are optimal for that page. If it is a blog, you want them to subscribe to blog updates. You may want them to go through relevant case studies and whitepapers if it is a corporate site. In a nutshell, don’t let them think too hard about what their expected next action is on this website. Guide them gently using calls to action placed prominently at the right places on the website. Mostly, these right places are the ones where a visitor has just completed their original purpose (for which they landed on the site) and is wondering what to do next.
5. Too many options: Having too many options for a visitor can also lead to a higher bounce rate. This is partly the reason why you will observe that the bounce rate on your homepage is probably higher than on your inner website pages. Having too many links/calls to action competing for visitor attention can increase anxiety and lead to visitors leaving the website in search of a better alternative. This is where experienced conversion optimization firms (such as Wingify ) and good web designers help you in creating a proper layout with different calls to action appealing to different kinds of visitors, hence reducing bounce rate.

How to fix the high bounce rate?

Reducing the high bounce rate significantly is possible. As different websites serve different goals and cater to different audiences, there is no sure-shot way of fixing the bounce rate. For instance, LA Tourism successfully reduced its bounce rate by 43%. 

There are several general methodologies you can try to reduce the bounce rate:

• Segment bounce rate by landing/entry page: your website’s overall bounce rate conveys absolutely no actionable information; it is vague and imprecise. The best way to get a true picture of your website’s bounce rate is to see the bounce rate for each landing/entry page. Using your web analytics tool, see which are the top 20 landing pages on your website and what their bounce rates are. You will be surprised to know that there is a dramatic difference in bounce rate across different landing pages. Your top priority should be to fix or optimize pages/categories that are most trafficked and have the highest bounce rates.
• Surveys: there are many tools on the web that allow you to survey visitors who are about to bounce, just before they leave the website. Though I particularly don’t like such methodologies because they frustrate an already unsatisfied visitor, you may find them useful for your website and audience type.
• Visitor moves and heatmaps: products such as VWO Insights help you to record mouse movements, clicks, scroll activity, and keypresses of your visitors to find out what exactly they do once they arrive on your landing pages. It can be a great way to find out that, for example, most of your visitors don’t notice your ‘SIGNUP NOW’ button in the sidebar (And you thought people aren’t interested in the offering). Similarly, you can see heatmaps to find out where exactly on the page visitors are clicking/engaging and if it is optimal.
• Testing: The only way to find out what works is to test it. You should set up a split test to try multiple different website designs, layouts, styling, calls to action, etc. Hire a testing agency, if you wish, but make sure you are doing testing on your website continuously to always reduce the bounce rate.

Download Free: Grow Website Traffic Guide

You can understand more about user research from the below video.

What are your strategies for reducing bounce rates? Do you think you are doing a good job on your website (as far as optimizing bounce rate is concerned)? Are you satisfied with your existing bounce rate? 

The answers to these questions can only be found through systematic and continuous testing on your website. Once you have the test results in your hand, make sure you focus your website optimization efforts first on the bounce rate and then on other metrics.