5 strategies for reducing ecommerce bounce rate (with expert tips)

Let’s face it: something is probably off if potential customers leave your ecommerce site before they make it past the first page they land on. Whether they can’t find what they’re looking for or just don’t like what they see, it’s essential for any ecommerce business to be aware of what pages visitors ‘bounce’ from in high numbers—and why. 

This article covers several customer-centric tools for understanding and reducing ecommerce bounce rate.

5 ways to reduce your ecommerce site’s bounce rate

Generally, a high bounce rate could mean something on your homepage or product page is broken, unclear, or off-putting, while a lower bounce rate might mean the opposite. 

That said, context matters. For example, a high bounce rate on a contact page isn’t necessarily cause for concern because those visitors most likely found the information they needed. 

When it comes to reducing ecommerce bounce rates, it’s valuable to know where and why visitors don’t explore past the first page they see. The following five strategies will allow you to step into your customers’ shoes to get a better understanding of what’s causing them to bounce. 

1. Go beyond basic bounce rate metrics

Naturally, you’ll want to start by determining your website’s bounce rate. If you’re conducting regular ecommerce website analysis, chances are you’re already familiar with Google Analytics (GA) and the fact that it can automatically calculate bounce rate, or the percentage of page sessions that result in a bounce. This statistic can be examined and broken down in various ways, depending on what exactly you’re trying to learn from a page’s bounce rate.

Tools like Google Analytics and Contentsquare will calculate bounce rates for your ecommerce site 

🧑‍🏫 Expert tip: Joel Klettke, the conversion rate optimization (CRO) expert behind Business Casual Copywriting, recommends evaluating bounce rate and website traffic sources. The example image above shows a GA report that differentiates a page’s bounce rate by traffic source. 

If you’re using paid search ads, customer retention emails, or social media campaigns and are unhappy with the bounce rate of visitors they bring in, it may be worth re-evaluating your marketing strategy—make sure your ads properly reflect the type of content visitors will find on linked landing pages. 

And keep in mind that bounce rate can negatively affect search engine rankings: a high bounce rate signals to search engines that users don’t find your page relevant to their search, which leads to lower rankings.

Supplement Google Analytics with experience analytics tools

Don’t forget: there’s more to the story behind bounce rate numbers. Let’s consider the following bounce scenarios:

• Visitor A arrives on a product page and leaves after a few seconds

• Visitor B arrives on a product page and spends a few minutes on it before leaving

There’s no difference between either scenario in Google Analytics’ eyes: they're both a bounce. But for you as an ecommerce business owner, manager, or optimizer, knowing what happened in either scenario—whether an element was broken or a product impossible to find—might be the key to improving the page’s conversion rate.

Since Google Analytics can’t tell you why people bounce from your page, you need to gather additional user behavior insights to ditch assumptions, and get actual explanations that lead to actionable solutions. Pairing GA data with qualitative, customer-centric tools like the ones we list below is the way to go.

💡Pro tip: Contentsquare is the perfect companion to Google Analytics. With our seamless GA integration, you can combine information that shows you what’s happening on your ecommerce site with information that answers why those things are happening. 

2. Use heatmaps to reveal what visitors see and interact with

Have you ever gotten lost in a poorly organized (physical) store, endlessly searching for the item you need? Just like with a physical storefront, online businesses need to put deliberate thought into how potential customers browse their ecommerce store. Product arrangement and content flow directly influence how navigable or familiar a site feels for visitors, whether they’re perusing for the first time or returning for a repeat purchase.

Heatmaps, which come in various forms, visualize how visitors behave and interact with your site, providing answers to questions like:

• Do people see the most important content when they first land on a page?

• Did they abandon a page halfway through because they couldn’t find what they wanted?

• Do they intuitively interact with clickable elements, or become frustrated after clicking something inactive?

Understanding these behaviors will give you insight into why certain pages have a higher bounce rate. Let’s look at what you can learn from different types of heatmaps.

• Scroll maps: scroll maps show how far down the page a visitor scrolls and, more specifically, whether they make it below ‘the fold’, the top area of the page initially displayed on their screen. Scroll maps automatically calculate the average fold on your page so you can tell if crucial elements, like a call-to-action (CTA) button, are immediately visible on desktop and mobile devices. 

• Click maps: while scroll maps show what people see on a page, click maps show what they interact with. Visitors who bounce after seeing only one page haven’t clicked any active links or back buttons—but you can still use click maps to investigate where people click on average or if they’re clicking non-clickable elements, which could frustrate them enough to want to leave your site.

• Move maps: move maps show mouse movement as users navigate through a page. Unconsciously or not, users’ eyes follow the movements of the mouse as they click and hover over the different elements of the page. Hence, they give you an idea of where people might be looking as they go through (and leave) your page.

• Engagement maps, a tool unique to Contentsquare, combine click, scroll, and move data into a single view. This heatmap makes it easier to spot clear behavior patterns and understand what content your users find most valuable.

Contentsquare’s Heatmaps tool allows you to create different types of maps to get the full picture

🧑‍🏫 Expert tip: not all is lost if a potential customer doesn’t find what they want on the first page they visit. Ecommerce growth consultant Rachel Jacobs sees this as an opportunity—you can still incentivize visitors to stay by helping them discover other related products they might want or need with strategically placed product recommendations. Inspiring visitors to continue browsing can increase engagement and conversions.

You can see how well your product recommendation setup works by placing heatmaps on product pages and noting the percentage of visitors who click on related products. If visitors aren’t paying attention to the section, you may need to move it around or make it more eye-catching.

3. Collect customer feedback with on-site surveys

Finding out where website visitors click (or want to, but can’t) offers you a glimpse into their intentions and expectations, but there’s still some guesswork involved when you want to know the reasons behind their behavior. 

To really understand what might cause someone to bounce, why not ask them? With on-site surveys, you can gather real-time feedback from visitors about their experience.

Website survey tools like Contentsquare Surveys are designed to help you strategically improve your site’s user experience, which is ultimately at the heart of customer delight and satisfaction. Ask visitors about their overall impressions by placing a survey on your pages and asking pointed questions, depending on the nature of the page:

• For a product page: what do you think of the product information on this page?

• For an information page: can you find the information you’re looking for?

• For any page: what’s the ONE thing we should change on this page?

You can even ask visitors why they’re leaving from a specific page: Contentsquare’s customizable exit-intent popup survey template lets you effortlessly create a survey to understand the causes behind a high bounce rate. 

You may learn that you’re losing potential sales because the copy on your pricing page is confusing, or because you don’t offer international shipping, while your competitors do.

An example of an exit-intent survey

Once you evaluate and analyze your survey answers, you can make informed decisions about what changes to make to your site’s design and business structure. 

Optimizing your site can involve eliminating irrelevant copy or playing around with more engaging fonts and formats. Or maybe your site gives the wrong impression—to convey that your business is professional and trustworthy, use high-quality pictures and consider incorporating customer reviews and testimonials to build social proof.

🧑‍🏫 Expert tip: when researching why people abandon your site, Hotjar Founder David Darmanin recommends focusing on a group he calls the ‘undecided explorers’: potential customers who fit your ideal customer profile but require additional persuasion before committing.

Your job is to find out why these prospects aren’t making it through to more than one page of your website. It might sound counterintuitive, but one way to do this is to run a post-purchase survey and ask your newly converted customers what almost made them not convert. The barriers they managed to overcome may be proving too difficult for other, less motivated visitors. With this knowledge, you can fix whatever needs fixing for everyone who comes to your site in the future.

💡Pro tip: to collect valuable qualitative data from users, you need to ask questions that will lead to actionable insights. But it might seem daunting to come up with the right questions to ask, and you may not have the resources to invest in extensive brainstorming. 

With Contentsquare AI for surveys, you can generate a survey focused on reducing bounce rate in seconds. Better yet: with automated summary reports, Contentsquare AI will analyze your open-ended survey responses and provide you with a summary of findings, quotes to support those findings, and actionable recommendations for the next steps.

Contentsquare AI lets you generate surveys in seconds depending on your goal

4. Watch what visitors do before bouncing with session replays

If you really want to see your site through your customers' eyes, consider monitoring their behavior with session replays. Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool anonymizes personally identifiable information and focuses solely on how a visitor navigates a site or page, including keyboard strokes, scrolling, and click and movement data. 

To look into the reasons for bounces, just segment sessions in Contentsquare’s Session Replay to see users who bounced from a page. 

Some things to ask yourself as you watch these sessions:

• Which areas of the page do users linger on, and which sections do they miss entirely?

• Do they seem confused or frustrated? Are they repeatedly scrolling up and down in search of something?

• What are they doing immediately before leaving? Did they abandon the page when they saw a specific item was out of stock, or after several attempts to click a non-clickable element?

Paying attention to these behaviors helps you identify which areas of a page are persuasive to prospective buyers and which areas may act as deterrents.

Session replays are also invaluable for spotting technical errors and other issues with your site—think 404 errors, faulty drop-down menus, and mobile rendering problems. Usability issues are one of the most common aspects that drive visitors away: a bounce is almost inevitable if people can’t progress on a page that doesn’t work. Analyzing session recordings is one of the simplest forms of usability testing when you’re trying to determine whether a usability issue is the culprit behind a page’s high bounce rate.

Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool lets you visualize exactly where users encounter errors, so you can quickly identify and fix friction points

🧑‍🏫 Expert tip: if you’re not sure what high-bounce pages to focus on first, take the advice of ecommerce growth consultant Rachel Jacobs. Product pages “are the heart of your business,” and “making sure that the product images are clearly and accurately displayed, add-to-cart functionality is easy, and reviews are visible is a good place to start.” Prioritizing the optimization of your product pages helps you streamline the checkout process and preemptively avoid cart abandonment.

Reviewing session replays of visitors that viewed a product page and bounced will reveal where they try to click, and how often they’re scrolling up and down in search of something. Use Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool to filter sessions by frustration level to uncover and address common pain points.

Not only does Contentsquare assign your session replays a frustration score but it tells you the reason for the high score

5. Test the success of individual conversion pages with funnel analysis

As a part of conversion rate optimization, funnel analysis is used to identify where site visitors drop off along a specific marketing funnel. Though this normally involves looking at an entire flow or progression through multiple pages, funnel analysis is still relevant for identifying why people bounce from the first page of a funnel.

What’s more, Contentsquare’s Funnel Analysis integrates with Session Replay and vice versa. You can quickly identify landing pages with high bounce rates and dive into the recordings for that page to see why people are leaving. Or, if you spot a usability issue in a single session replay, you can check if that experience is a one-off or part of a bigger issue.

With funnels, it’s beneficial to conduct A/B testing on your landing pages to discover the features visitors love and hate, either leading them to continue down the funnel or bounce away, never to be seen again. A great time to test is when you want to implement changes to a page based on insights gathered from heatmaps, surveys, or session replays. 

To run an A/B test on a high-bounce landing page, split inbound visitors between the original landing page and a version with changes based on user feedback. If more people continue through the funnel after seeing the new landing page, it might indicate that whatever features were updated are performing well and can be implemented for all future visitors.

Contentsquare lets you carry out A/B testing with Session Replay, showing you how users experience each version of your site

🧑‍🏫 Expert tip: shortening overall site speed and individual page speeds is a quick and easy step to reduce bounce rate and optimize conversions. People’s attention spans are short, and a slow page load time can result in visitors bouncing from a landing page before they even see what’s on it. 

While researching ecommerce conversion data, Michael Wiegand, Director of Analytics at Portent, found that sites with a 1-second load speed have conversion rates 2.5x higher than sites with a 5-second load speed. This is where Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis (hello!👋) shines—it lets you track your website’s performance metrics like speed proactively. When an issue arises and your page speed drops, it lets you quickly pinpoint the root cause to keep your site running smoothly.

Why should ecommerce sites care about reducing bounce rate?

Satisfying as it may be, reducing bounce rate in ecommerce shouldn’t be about watching your numbers drop below the industry average—see it instead as a customer-centric approach to making sure your visitors have the best possible experience they can while engaging with your ecommerce business. 

When you understand and empathize with the real needs of your customers, an improved bounce rate will be a byproduct of you fixing whatever is not currently working for them. Give your customers what they want and need; they’ll reward you by sticking around.

FAQs about ecommerce bounce rate