Why is the Bounce Rate so High on Your Landing Page?

/ Zach Heller
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A landing page is the page on your site which people land on when they click on one of your paid ads – be they search ads, display ads, social ads, or others. And so, many marketers and the companies they represent expect that some percentage of people who land on those pages will end up leaving before the do anything else.

In analytics terms, we call that a bounce. And the page’s bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who expect your website before completing any additional action.

A high bounce rate is clearly not a good thing. But traditionally, marketers tend to be more tolerant of a high bounce rate on a landing page, where a visitor has come from an advertisement, than they would be on other pages of the site. And I am not here telling you that you should expect visitors you pay for to behave the same way as visitors who come to your site organically.

However, just because we expect higher bounce rates on our landing pages, doesn’t mean we should be okay with them. And it doesn’t mean we can’t work to lower them.

So make 2019 the year you refocus on landing pages, and cut those bounce rates in half.

How? Start by understanding why people are bouncing in the first place.

Here are five possible reasons:

  1. You are advertising to the wrong people.

  2. Your page doesn’t provide enough information.

  3. Your page is not optimized for mobile.

  4. You are not clear about what they should do next.

  5. You don’t give them any incentive to take action.

Let’s explore each of these possibilities and what you can do about them.

You are advertising to the wrong people.

If the wrong people are landing on the page, it’s no wonder that they are leaving. This may happen if your targeting is too broad, meaning that your ad is being shown to people who are not in the market for your offerings. It also can happen when you use the same landing page for multiple channels and audiences. It is a best practice to make sure your landing page is specific to each audience. To accomplish that, you may need to create multiple landing pages for each campaign.

Your page doesn’t provide enough information.

Many companies treat landing pages as teasers for a certain product or service. They provide just enough information to whet a customer’s appetite and get them to take the next step. But what you think is enough information to tease a product, may not answer the questions that most of your visitors have. And rather than take the required next step, they leave your site and go looking for alternative solutions.

Your page is not optimized for mobile.

We are living in a mobile-first world. More web activity is taking place on phones and tablets than ever before. And your landing pages absolutely must be geared toward the mobile visitor. This means focusing on load times, readability, and usability. Challenge your own perceptions of your landing pages by looking at the bounce rate for mobile users separate from desktop users. You may find that solving for mobile alone can cut your bounce rate in half.

You are not clear about what they should do next.

Some people will leave your site because they simply don’t know what else to do. A strong call-to-action is an important part of any landing page design. Once you have provided enough information to convince the visitor that they are in the right place, give them an action to take. It could be a phone call, a form to submit, a button to start the sales process, a web chat. And make it obvious. The more they have to search for it, the greater the likelihood that some will give up.

You don’t give them any incentive to take action.

Why do this now when I can do it later? That is the mentality of most consumers. It is up to you, as the marketer, to give them a reason to act now. Perhaps it’s the opportunity to claim a special offer, perhaps your offer is only good for a limited time, or perhaps they don’t want to have to wait in line. As a marketer, you are constantly fighting for attention. So don’t squander that attention when you get it by letting consumers leave without taking the next step.

When You Emphasize Everything, You Emphasize Nothing

/ Zach Heller

This is a post about design. But it could just as easily be a post about copywriting, or pricing and offers, or marketing strategy on the whole. Because the concept is the same no matter what we talk about.

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But to really hone in on the message, let’s use an example. Let’s say that you are responsible for marketing at a company that sells doggie treats. Your boss/CEO/manager puts you in charge of a new campaign to launch the latest line of doggie treats.

“There’s a lot riding on this,” she says. “But I’m confident you can get the job done.”

You are working with your web team and your email team and your social team (or maybe that’s all one person, and maybe it’s you) to put together the initial announcements and offers, and to create the landing page on the site that you will drive interested dog owners to.

Your web designer might ask, “What is the most important element of this page?”

Several things enter your mind, and you start saying them aloud:

  • The name of the product
  • The special introductory offer
  • The “buy” button
  • The main product image
  • Our 5 star rating on Facebook

Notice the look of panic (or disgust) on your web designer’s face. She asked you what the most important element of the page is and you have already listed five different elements of the page.

And that’s the point – when you are creating a web page, or an email, or an ad, or anything else, everything can’t be the most important thing. We have to put the emphasis on one, maybe two things, and let the designers and copywriters do what they do best to highlight those things.

In your mind, you might say, “Well, those are all important.” What you mean is that they are all important to you. Or that you don’t know which ones are more important than the others.

But if everything is important, you end up emphasizing nothing. And then the prospective customer doesn’t know where to look or what to read.

By highlighting what’s important, you guide their thinking, and shuttle them through the purchase funnel.

To get into this new mindset, it helps to pay attention to how other companies emphasize certain things. Look at websites, and billboards, and marketing emails and ask yourself, “what is the most important thing here that the designer/marketer wants me to see?” The answer should be clear. It should jump out at you.

Then ask the same question of your own stuff. Do you notice a difference? How well are you guiding consumers toward those points of emphasis?

Who Are You Writing For?

/ Zach Heller
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There is a tendency among those charged with writing the marketing copy for any website, email, or advertisement to ignore their audience. This is not intentional, but rather, results from a natural human tendency to see things from our own perspective rather than others’.

But marketers should know, ignoring your audience is not the way to win customers. So the question becomes:

Who Are You Writing For?

Often, the answer to this question is simple. If you are writing copy for your website, you are writing for the many visitors who come to your site each day in search of a solution to their problem. If you are writing copy for an advertisement about your new product, you are writing for the prospective customer who is unaware of said product and all of its benefits.

Rather than trying to imagine this vague notion of your audience, though, you should seek to get as specific as you can. This is why companies create buyer personas, representative descriptions of a target customer group.

Rather than writing for “all website visitors”, you are writing for Susan, a 50-year old married woman with adult children who lives in a wealthy suburb and makes weekly trips to the grocery store. Rather than writing for “prospective customers unaware of your product”, you are writing for Tom, a 30-year old technology enthusiast who lives in a big city and takes public transportation to and from the office every day.

When you know who you are writing for, it changes the way you write.

Now you can speak directly to your audience, identifying how it is that your products or services can improve their life, instead of speak in vagaries, using the type of language that your employees might use to describe the product but means very little to someone who has never heard of your company before.

Sell the benefits, not the features. And talk in words or phrases that your customers would use, because that is how you are going to grab, and hold, their attention.

Is Your Brand Making the Right First Impression?

/ Zach Heller
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As marketers, we have to care about the way potential customers experience our company. These are the consumers in the marketplace who are not necessarily aware yet of our brand, so they don’t know what we do, or how good our products are.

Just like in our daily lives as human beings, where we only get one chance to make a first impression, so it is with our brands. Potential customers only ever become aware of you once. And once they form an impression, it is going to be expensive to get them to change it. So it’s critical that the first impression is the best one.

But what do most first impressions look like?

There are two big ways that consumers come into contact with brands for the first time.

  1. Advertising – consumers see an ad. It could be a billboard or an only banner, a newspaper or magazine ad, a radio or tv spot, or one of a thousand other advertising channels. But before they ever visit your website or walk into your store, they are responding to that advertisement.
     
  2. Word of Mouth – consumers hear about your company from someone in their lives, friends, family, coworkers, relatives. They might be customers of yours or just familiar with your products. They might have good things to say or bad, and they’re in complete control of the first impression your brand makes on this new consumer.

People may argue that there are a million other ways consumers encounter brands for the first time. However, most are variations of the two above. 99.999% of consumers are not visiting your website or walking into your store if they’ve never heard of you before.

So what does this tell marketers?

If you care about the impression that your brand is making, these are the areas you need to focus. You need to devote the time and energy required to making sure all of your advertising creative meets your high expectations. Nothing goes out that does not send the right signal. We should never be half-hearted about our advertising.

Second, you need to devote just as much time and energy to ensuring that your company lives up to the promises it makes to customers. Why? Because that’s how you control word of mouth.

Your customers are talking about you. What are they going to say?

One Final Consideration

The second half of any first impression may be as important as the first, and so deserves a mention here. If the first half of the first impression is any good, the second half is a visit (to your store or to your website).

You can still lose them at the visit stage if you don’t live up to their expectations. Whether it was an advertisement or word of mouth that this person is responding to, they will come with a sense of the promises your company makes. Again, it becomes critical to keep them.

Wow people once, and you will win their business. Wow them again and again, and you will win their loyalty.

The Marketer’s Guide to Subtlety

/ Zach Heller
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Generally speaking, marketers are not good at being subtle. Subtlety does not always work its way into marketing. And when it does, it is often so subtle that it goes unnoticed and, therefore, underappreciated.

But when marketers know how to use subtlety to their advantage, it can produce powerful results.

Not Subtle

When we think of traditional marketing tactics, it becomes obvious how in your face marketers can be. Consider coupons, sales stickers, loud commercials, scantily clad models, professional spokespeople, and billboards on the side of the road. The list goes on and on. The aim is to capture your full attention away from whatever it is you are doing. And most companies have become very, very good at it.

But that, in itself, is part of the problem. We’ve become so good, as marketers, at getting your attention, that we have turned consumers off of marketing tactics left and right. Now consumers know when they’re being marketed to, and they don’t care for it.

That is where subtlety comes in.

Subtle

There are tools that marketers have in their toolbox that too often go unused.

Consumers are people. And people are predictable. There are ways to craft your messaging or present your offers that will trigger them to act in a certain way. But in order for these tactics to be effective, you have to be confident enough to let them speak for themselves. The minute you try to hit people over the head with your marketing, you’ll turn them off.

The goal is to create marketing that does not feel like marketing at all.

Content fits nicely into this bucket. Content marketing caught in over the last five years or so because it was a way to generate brand awareness that also provided real value to consumers. By teaching them something, or sharing something interesting, you are engaging with your audience in a way that does not feel like you’re trying to sell to them.

Companies today are looking for all the different ways they can accomplish this. Hence the interest in areas like sponsorships, events and experiences, product placement and brand integration, influencer marketing, and more.

The more marketers are able to capture the attention of consumers in subtle ways, the more powerful our marketing actually becomes.