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3 Quick Ways to Lower Bounce Rateby Andrew Hiddleston

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:47 — 3.5MB) |

Video Breakdown: 0:00 – 0:08 Introduction 0:09 – 0:53 Image sizes 0:54 – 1:34 User-f riendly 404 1:35 – 2:44Limit f ield lengths 2:45 – 3:40 Quick recap of t ips 3:41 – 3:47 Wrap up

Andrew here f or LeanMeanMarketing.com. In today’s video I’ve got a f ew internet marketing tips f or you thatcan help you lower bounce rate while optimizing your website. Let’s get right to it.

If you’re using images on your website, either f or image marketing, you want to be very cautious as to how bigthose images are. Let me give you a great example: On LeanMeanMarketing, we produce a unique image f orevery single video that we create. When these images come f rom the designer, they’re almost 3 megabytes insize which is huge f or an image.

Now obviously 3 megabytes would be much too large to upload to the internet. Everyone’s bandwidth isdif f erent speeds and large images can cause delays with page loading.

So we use a f ree web program called TinyPNG, you simply upload your PNG there and it will compress itwithout losing any resolution, transparency or anything that you may have in the image. Af terwards, a 3megabyte image is about 150 kilobytes. That’s a huge dif f erence.

The next t ip would be to have a user- f riendly 404 page. What I mean by that is when someone goes to a pagethat either doesn’t exist on your website anymore or they’ve been given an incorrect link, a lot of the timesthey’ll go to a 404 page. The 404 page just basically tells them that it doesn’t exist anymore.

What you want to do is you want to create a user- f riendly version of that. You want to include a link back toyour homepage and you want to include a link to your contact and to your search as well; if you can include asearch bar all the better. You want to make that an actual handy resource. So if someone does inadvertentlyget there, they have all the tools and inf ormation to get back to your homepage or to f ind exactly what they’researching f or.

The last t ip is actually more related to shopping cart than your actual website. But it ’s something I don’t think alot of people think about. This t ips is the result of some serious split testing we did a f ew months ago.

I’m ref erring to f ield lengths. A lot of the time you’ll see on the check out f orm, all the f ields will be similar lengthand they’re all quite long.

If you can limit the size of the f ields, both f or f irst name and last name, credit card, all of that inf ormation, doso. If you have a credit card f ield and you know you only need a certain a number of digits, don’t make the f ieldany longer than it needs to be. When someone enters their credit card online into a shopping cart f ield andthere is still extra space lef t over af ter they have entered that inf ormation, it tends to cause doubt andconcern in the mind of the prospect; like they might be missing numbers or they’ve done something wrong.

This actually increases your abandon rate. Even though everyone knows how many digits there are in a creditcard, it ’s the psychology behind it.

So if you can limit the f ield size, so it ’s the exact number of characters as the actual credit card or as thatpiece of inf ormation, you should go ahead and do that. Now of course that’s only gonna work f or pieces ofinf ormation where you know in advance how many numbers or how many characters it is. But if you do know in

advance, you should try to implement that.

Again to quickly recap, your image sizes should be as small as possible. It doesn’t meant they have to be smallin size, the f ile size itself just needs to be small. You can use something like TinyPNG or SmushIt which is aYahoo tool. Both of those will do essentially the same thing f or you. Af ter that, you want to have a user-f riendly 404 page and it can be something very simple like a link back to your homepage, a link to your contactus, and a search bar so they can search your website. Having the user- f riendly 404 page will not only keepthem on your website but then help you direct them to where you want them to be going.

And last, if you have a shopping cart or you’re using any type of check out system, you want to be cautioushow big your f ield sizes are. Like we gave the example f or the credit card, if you know in advance the creditcard’s only a certain number of digits, the f ield size should only be that size to accommodate that number ofcharacters. There’s no point in having extra, it causes conf usion and doubt in the mind of the potentialcustomer.

Again, this is Andrew Hiddleston f or LeanMeanMarketing.com. I hope you f ound these tips usef ul and I’ll talk toyou soon.