You invest in increasing site traffic: from paid to earned media, social engagement, campaigns, content, and more. And while increasing site traffic is important, there is something else you must consider – your bounce rate.

Here is the importance of bounce rate, as told by the numbers.

• Let’s assume a health industry website has about 20,000 monthly Google AdWords visitors, an 86% bounce rate, and those visitors did not complete a conversion on the first page
• According to Adgooroo, an average CPC in the health industry is $2.16
• 20,000 clicks at $2.16 per click would cost $43,200
• An 86% bounce rate means that only 2,800 out of potentially 20,000 visitors see a second page on the site. If visitors that get to a second page preform better at the end of the conversion funnel, this is the number you would want to look at.
• Reducing the bounce rate from 86% to 50% would mean that 7,200 more visitors would see a second page
• while bounce rate remain at 86%, Getting this same number of visitors by increasing AdWords traffic would cost well over $100,000

Reducing the bounce rate in accordance with your website’s KPIs, can come at a much lesser cost than the $100,000 required to increase visitors by paying per click. Moreover, the reduced bounce rate keeps on giving month after month (while the $100,000 investment would need to be repeated every month). This is all considering that your KPIs show that more page views result in increased conversions, of course.

Here are five tips to decrease bounce rates and get better return on your traffic investments:

1.      Improve meta descriptions

The most obvious reason for a high bounce rate is that visitors did not find what they were looking for on your site. To improve this, provide detailed meta information about the contents of the page. If they know what they will find on the page before they get there, chances are better that they will not bounce off. You can find great tips on how to write effective meta descriptions here.

2.      Improve targeting of paid campaigns

By narrowing down the targeting of paid campaigns, you ensure that the people who visit your page are the ones who are actually interested in what you offer. If a page has information about an online email marketing course, for example, make sure your LinkedIn campaigns target email marketers, not marketers in general.

3.      Direct visitors to appropriate landing pages

By directing different visitors to specific landing pages, you increase the likelihood that they will find the content they are looking for. If you run campaigns for an upcoming webinar, for example, make sure the links direct to a landing page that is focused on the webinar (not to your website homepage). But no matter how many landing pages you have, they must each be optimized to ensure a positive digital customer experience.

4.      Improve the digital customer experience

By tracking how real users interact with your landing pages (or homepage), you can optimize it to enhance the customer experience. Test different headlines and call-to-action buttons.

(Sidebar: make sure you have call-to-action buttons – 70% of small business B2B websites don’t!)

Try different color schemes and uses of white space. Make sure pages are responsive and laid out logically, and optimize technical elements, like load time.

Test everything and test often; but be sure to track behavior (not just clicks) for each change you make by using heatmaps.

5.      Remove, simplify, and test

In general, decluttering reduces bounce rates. So, review your page and get rid of anything that is not necessary. Makes CTAs simple to understand and find. Make images bright and big. Avoid popups if your users find them annoying. Remove unnecessary verbiage and elements that do not advance the goal of conversion. And, of course, be sure to test every element you change.

By following these five tips, you can easily reduce your bounce rate and start converting more of your existing traffic without having to invest more in obtaining more traffic.

By Merav Keren

This post was originally posted on the Clicktale Blog on October 28, 2015