Investigating why bounce rate is so high

When it comes to landing pages, it’s all about expectations. Whatever enticed that visitor to click on the link or ad that brought them to a specific page plays a huge part in setting the visitor up for the initial experience with your site and products. If the visitors' expectations aren’t met, or they don’t immediately see the appeal in staying on your site longer, then they’ll leave. Flat out asking people if their expectations were met, combined with the referrer data, will give you better insight into what went wrong with that visitors' experience.

Be sure to watch our "Conversion Rate Optimization Techniques that *Actually* Work" Webinar with Unbounce. 

Survey Content

Possible questions to help with this objective:

• "Did this page meet your expectations?"
• "Does this page contain the information you were looking for?"

Recommended answer type: Single answer type. "Yes/No" as the answer options. No branches to "What were you expecting to see on this page?

If you need help understanding all the options available within the Survey Editor, please visit this portion of our Help Center. 

Recommended targeting options

• Where should this survey appear?: Pages with the highest bounce rate (see Google Analytics for these pages). Use the OR Pipe Regular Expression to target the top 3. 
• Who should be prompted to take this survey?: 100%, or a percentage (20% or less is recommended for high-traffic sites) when the referring domain is not [yourdomain.com]
• When should this survey be displayed?: When it looks like someone is about to abandon the page
• How often should this survey be displayed?: Only show once per visitor, or continue showing until the visitor provides a response. 

If you need help understanding all the options available within the Targeting Section, please visit this portion of our Help Center. 

After you start getting responses: When you get around 100 responses (which may take a little bit considering that write-ins have less than a 1% response rate), pull the CSV and group the responses by where visitors came from (the referring URL). Use this information to identify patterns in the links and ads that people are clicking on with the answer they gave you. This should give you a better understanding of how to improve these pages to better match those expectations. You can then run an A/B test to see if making the needed changes to those pages improves your bounce rate. 

These are just suggestions. We recommend experimenting to see what works best for you!

While the suggestions mentioned are a great place to start, we ask you to keep in mind that what may work well for some many not work for all. Constantly test and tweak your surveys to hone in on what works best for your circumstances. Click here to see how we recommend making changes to your surveys to get better results.