Your website’s bounce rate is an indicator of how your website impacts viewers at first glance – do they stay or do they go?
If your bounce rate is high, take a closer look at your website design, content, and usability in order to improve your user experience. As you make changes you’ll likely be rewarded with increased conversion rates as well as reduced bounce rates.
How do you really know what things are most important to your audience, and what will be the easiest and most appealing for them to use? You can find out about this through user testing. Testing will let you know what does and doesn’t work about your website, and what is distracting or misleading for your visitors.
Usability testing consists of showing your website to possible users and asking t them to perform some common tasks while noting where they run into trouble.
From there, it is your task to try and fix the problems that testing demonstrated without creating any more—which can become quite the juggling act! For this and other reasons, testing needs to be an integrated part of your website planning and design. It is definitely not a last minute operation to try and eliminate all the usability issues that a website has. It is important to note that although things may seem perfectly obvious and navigable to you, you have been working on it since its inception. Your high level of familiarity with the site will make you a biased observer.
How do you test? There are a lot of different ways. With time and available funds, you can hire a professional to design and run tests for you. This is, of course, the best way to use testing to its fullest potential. However, oftentimes you may not have the resources available for this sort of testing. This is where quick and dirty form of user testing shines. It is a lot less thorough and precise than traditional testing, but it will work to identify the major usability problems present in your site.
Most of what testing takes is time and patience. You need to be able to watch someone attempt to use your website without interfering or giving directions. The entire point is to find out where they get stuck or confused, not to get them through the task of locating a product info page. You can feel free to avoid fixing minor problems that only cause a momentary pause in site usage; what you need to focus on are the big problems. These range from problems in navigation to something so basic as being able to tell from a glance what the site is all about.
User testing is an essential task of designing a website that is user-friendly, which avoids making anyone think.
Two very helpful websites, where you can learn more about usability, are:
Businesses are flocking to social media venues in an effort to increase exposure and gain new customers. For many, their efforts are paying off in the form of increased visitors and new sales. On the flip side, however, many businesses are also experiencing a drop in conversion rates after entering the social media world.
Why? They’ve increased their volume of viewers without targeting the message, resulting in a higher bounce rate, and many more people who aren’t finding what they expected to find. You can improve conversion with social media by keeping the quirks of the system in mind as you design your landing pages.
Why don’t more visitors respond to the calls to action on your website? This question came up recently, so, I took a journey in the wayback machine to see how I handled it in my previous life as a stockbroker.
As a stockbroker, I never, ever asked prospective clients for the order. I asked enough questions to get them talking and shut up. Then I provided answers to their questions, and enough information, until the prospective client said some version of, “What’s next?” I didn’t make the ‘close’, they did.
I bet you know how to cheer for your favorite team. Whether that cheer is as simple as chanting a batter’s name during a baseball game, or as involved as a singing and dancing team cheer at summer camp, we all know the powerful feeling of lifting our voices and letting everyone know what’s important to us.
Have you taken a good look at your website lately? Not just by uploading new content or adding products. I’m talking about really looking at your layout, navigation, and content as though you had never seen them before.
Increasing your conversion rate requires a pleasing website visitor experience that will easily lend itself to finding information and taking action.
According to BizRate, 75% of online shoppers have exited a website at least once during the past three months after adding items to the shopping cart, but without completing a purchase. This statistic is known as shopping cart abandonment.
At first glance, it may seem like there’s not much an e-commerce retailer can do to improve their cart abandonment rate. After all, how can you control whether the shopper’s dog needed to go out just then, or his daughter who is in the Army called right before he hit the checkout button?
Improving the conversion rate on your website doesn’t have to mean weeks of testing and redesigning. You can make positive changes to your website resulting in increased conversions by spending a few minutes each day baby stepping into conversion optimization.
One of the best books I’ve ever read on website usability was written by Steve Krug, called “Don’t Make Me Think . I had read it once before the Conversations on Website Conversion Book Club started reading it this July, but I’ve gotten even more out of it the second time through.
In many areas of life, thinking is very important. Thinking before you speak, thinking before you act, thinking through a problem to get to a solution…these are just a few of examples of how thinking helps us. So why is it so important to design a website so that people don’t have to think?
The toy store at the mall in my childhood home town was brilliant. They had a big display of popular toys right out front where every kid could come by and play with them.
A child who sees his favorite toy on the shelf gets excited, but a child who has that toy in his hands can be downright persuasive! That toy store increased sales by encouraging interaction.
You can do the same thing for your online store. You can increase visitor engagement with social media.Your goal is to make your site as interesting as possible to your visitors, especially through social media. Most people can’t go a day without checking Facebook. How can you make your site interesting to them?
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