Have you ever launched a website, had it going for a good few months, and then check into your Google Analytics dashboard to find that your bounce rate was higher than you thought it should be? It’s happened to the best of us. Yes. Even experienced marketing professionals.
When it comes to B2B websites, having bounce rates from prospects can be incredibly frustrating, especially since you’re typically marketing to a smaller number of people than you would with a B2C website. Keeping your bounce rate low can increase conversions, which can lead to more clients or customers.
In this article, we’re going to take a deep dive so you can learn a whole lot more about how to keep your B2B website bounce rate down. Stay tuned to find out why bounce rates happen, how to track them, how to lower them, and more. If you’re newer to the world of bounce rates, we’d recommend you read through this article in its entirety, so you’re armed with knowledge and ready to tackle bounce rates head-on. If you’re feeling antsy and want to get right down to the tools and tips for lowering your B2B website bounce rate, go ahead and click here.
Are you struggling to convert website visitors from Google ads? Check out our starter pack of negative keywords to help drive the right traffic to your website.
What is a bounce rate?
First, let’s talk about what a bounce is. A bounce is when a visitor comes to your website, visits one single page, and then leaves without visiting other pages. Your bounce rate is how many people bounced from pages of a website out of all visitors who visited your website during a specific period.
For the sake of simple math (we’re marketers, not mathematicians), let’s say you had 1000 visitors to your website within a week. Out of those thousand visitors, 400 of them visited one website page and then left your website. In that case, 40% of your visitors bounced. Therefore, your bounce rate is 40%.
Are bounces bad on a B2B website?
Every website will have a certain number of bounces because you will never have the exact content 100% of your visitors are looking for. Even Google isn’t quite smart enough about how to mind-read search intents. (Although they are getting pretty darn close.)
So while having a high bounce rate isn’t good, you’ll always have some sort of a bounce rate.
For the sake of simple math (we’re marketers, not mathematicians), let’s say you had 1000 visitors to your website within a week. Out of those thousand visitors, 400 of them visited one website page and then left your website. In that case, 40% of your visitors bounced. Therefore, your bounce rate is 40%.
What is a good bounce rate on a B2B website?
This number will vary depending on which source you look at, but typically an average B2B website bounce rate is right around 20% – 50% on average.
Keep in mind that the lower the bounce rate, the better. However, suppose you’re utilizing other marketing tactics, like running ads to specific website pages, for example. In that case, you may end up with a higher bounce rate than if people are organically finding your content.
How do you track bounces?
The best resource for website visitor tracking is Google Analytics. So long as you have Google Analytics installed on your website (your website developer can do this), Google will automatically track bounces for you. Google will track when a site visitor entered a page and which page was entered, how long the user visited the page, and what page they exited the website. If they enter and exit the website on the same page without visiting any other pages on the website within that session, that is when that visit is considered a bounce.
How often should you check on your B2B website bounce rate?
While you could keep daily or weekly tabs on your bounce rate, it isn’t necessary. When trying to improve your bounce rate, you don’t want to continuously make changes to pages without allowing a bit of time to go by to test what works and what doesn’t.
Therefore, we’d recommend checking your bounce rate every month. If you’ve been running Google Analytics on your website for at least a few months, you want to compare the data month over month to see which pages are improving, which ones are staying stable, and find any that may have an uptick in bounce rates.
Why do bounces happen?
Typically, a bounce will occur if someone visiting your website doesn’t find the information they were looking for. Other times, bounces can occur if they try to take an action, such as filling out an online form, and the form doesn’t complete successfully.
This means it’s especially important to make sure that you have good content on your website, so when people visit, they are more likely to stay.
1. Poor search intent
If you find that you’re getting a bounce from a specific page of your website, make sure it delivers the content meant for the search intent you are trying to target. Your website pages should all serve a purpose, and your CTAs should be specific in their goals.
Suppose a site visitor is led to your site looking for particular information, but it is difficult to find or doesn’t quickly address their need. In that case, they are likely to bounce away from the page, increasing your B2B website bounce rate.
2. Incorrect implementation of code
If you add standard, universal analytics code on your website and then set up tracking via Google Analytics tag manager, you will count activity twice. This would affect your bounce rate since results will appear duplicated.
Also, if you do not install Google Analytics correctly on your website, not only will your overall tracking be off or nonexistent, but your B2B website bounce rate will also be affected.
3. Stopping the buyer’s journey
Another place that can cause a bounce is a thank you page or follow-up page to filling out a form (post-click landing page). For instance, if you fill out a form through an ad and then get taken to a thank you landing page without continuing the journey to additional website pages, you will likely bounce away from that thank you page. If there isn’t a clear message of what the user should do next, website visitors will often leave the site, thinking they have completed whatever objective they were there to do.
As a marketer, having your user leave your website from one of these landing pages is often a missed opportunity to continue your user along the buyer’s journey. It’s important to continue providing content to your site visitor that will help them gather all of the information they need to make a possible purchase decision.
4. Slow page speed load time
It could be possible that your site visitors aren’t leaving because of content that isn’t converting. A huge factor for why people will leave a website is if the load time on your page is slow. We’ll talk a bit more about how you can combat this later in the article.
How to lower your B2B website bounce rate
Improving your bounce rate doesn’t have to be incredibly difficult. However, here are some strategies you can use to get you off to a good start.
Know your goals
This is marketing 101. For every objective you have in marketing, you should have a goal you’re trying to reach. With bounce rates, that shouldn’t be any different. To achieve the desired results for your website, know your goals going into it. You could have several of them when it comes to how visitors use your website. For bounce rates, though, you should have an achievable number you’re trying to reach. Your website updates should be geared towards achieving this number.
Understand your audience
Who you are trying to market your website to is very important. Before you update or launch a website, you should be laser-focused on who your intended audience is. Knowing this information will help you to create website content that is appropriate for these people.
You do not need to write your website content or design your webpages or landing pages, so they are targeted to everyone, nor should you. Understanding the needs and wants (pain points) of your audience will help you craft content on your website that will give your audience exactly what they are looking for. This is especially important in B2B marketing when ABM tactics are often used. You want to cast a smaller net to a more qualified audience vs. going after everyone and risking many of those visitors being a poor fit.
Need help to figure out your ideal audience? We’ve got you covered. Check out how to create a B2B ideal customer profile.
Do your keyword research
This part is essential, and it’s where you tie your audience with the services or products you provide. We talked about search intent earlier, and this is where it comes into play. You should have a good handle on what keyword or keyword phrases your audience is likely searching for to get to your website.
Once you know the information they will be looking for, you can craft your on-page content to match. Keep in mind that Google is using authentic content more and more to guide searches vs. keyword stuffing. Meaning, you don’t want to overuse keywords on your website pages. While you need to include them or variations of them, you also need to make sure the content is appealing to a reader and makes sense to a human more than a robot.
You can use several tools to do your keyword research, including Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush (our personal favorite), MOZ, and Ahrefs.
Optimize Your Page Loading Speed
As we mentioned earlier, slow loading pages can be a massive deterrent in people staying on your website.
There are plenty of ways to combat this, but one of the biggest reasons for slow page loading is images that are too large. We recommend using next-generation formats, which you can find more information on here.
Pages can also load slowly due to the following issues:
- Poor servers
- Too much traffic
- Poor caching techniques
- Too many HTTP requests
- Poorly written code
- Ads
- Not using a CDN
- Flash slowing down the site
If you find that your bounce rate could be high due to slow page loading, do some additional research to get to the bottom of the issue and optimize accordingly.
Set up A/B tests
An A/B test is where you create two variations of the same piece of content. In this case, we’re talking about website pages. This means you’ll create two identical web pages but with a slight variation on them. For instance, the page’s title might be different, or a CTA on the page might have different wording.
When you run an A/B test, you typically only want one variable to be different between your two test pieces. Otherwise, you risk the chances of not being able to track which variable was successful.
After you set up your A/B test, you need to wait a month or so to get a good idea of how they are performing. Once you’ve run your test, you can kill the page that doesn’t convert as well and drive traffic to the page that converts better. Or, you can continue optimizing and choose a different variable to test to improve further.
To set up your A/B test, you’ll want to use a tool like Google Optimize.
Tools to improve your bounce rate
These are a few of our favorite softwares that we like to use to help us optimize our website and the websites of our B2B clients.
Page Optimizer Pro – This tool helps website owners to optimize their on-page SEO to create optimized pages for Google. Through analyzing your page and providing recommendations, you can easily make page updates without a whole lot of extra work.
SmartLook – SmartLook lets you understand user behavior more in-depth. With SmartLook, you can also study scroll depth to see where on-page users are dropping off as they scroll down your website pages. If you begin to notice trends of where users are leaving your website, you can work on optimizing those parts of your pages to improve your B2B website bounce rate.
Microsoft Clarity – You may be thinking, “That’s not a Google product!” Yep, you’re right. In a tool that Google doesn’t have nailed down well yet, Microsoft Clarity helps you produce heat maps to track how users are flowing through website pages, so you can potentially see where they might be reading until they bounce off of the page.
Do you need more help with improving your B2B website bounce rate?
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