Understanding why your customers leave your website before completing a sale or leaving details for a callback is a key way to enhance their experience and increase lead generation.
Adil Hussain, Head of Performance, explains the key comprehension that you need to reduce the churn from your website, and how to apply this thinking to your next analytics review.
It’s frustrating to spend time and money identifying, targeting and directing leads to your website, only for them to drop off before heading to completion of an enquiry or leaving callback details. In the world of online data, you only have numbers to understand where and why they are doing this.
The point where people do drop off, however, can hold pivotal information in the quest for increased conversions. Let's discuss a few ways to re-evaluate your exit rates, which in turn can improve your customer experience and ultimately increase lead generation. We’ll start with the most important question.
What is Exit Rate?
The exit rate tells you the percentage of people who leave your site on any given page. This gives you insight as to which pages have the highest drop-off and therefore are the pages to evaluate the content and design to see what may be causing this drop.
Exit rate is calculated by dividing the number of exits from a particular page by the number of visits on that page.
A high exit rate means something isn’t working as it should.
What can cause high Exit Rates?
There are a range of factors that can affect exit rates, so a thorough review will be necessary to identify and address these. These factors include;
- Slow loading pages
- Poor content
- Bad user experience
- No clear next step
Reviewing your websites’ exit rate is one of the key pointers to help understand the health of your website, and can be useful in identifying points in your customer journey that aren’t working as intended. High exit rates can mean low lead generation.
In order to address these here are three considerations to ask yourself once you’ve identified which pages have high exit rates.
1. Can my high exit rate be addressed earlier in the customer journey?
To apply this way of thinking, always focus on the key goals of your website, and consider how you seamlessly and authoritatively move your customer towards this.
Armed with the focus on your goals and your customers needs, try to navigate your website as your customer would. Are they able to find what they are looking for? And are they able to find the next step in their journey? Can your customer get in touch if they have a question whilst on your product or service page?
On a very practical level, you should review the following:
- Menu setup
- Site navigation
- Calls to action
- Points of contact (forms, chat, phone, email)
2. Is my content affecting my exit rate?
While it is easy to create content around why your business, products or services are great, you need to create content your visitors are looking for and will want to engage with. With that in mind, what possible objections or concerns could they have based on the web page they are dropping off from?
You will have a far higher probability of connecting with them, and therefore converting them into a lead, when you reframe ‘why am I losing this potential sale?’, into ‘how can I create a great experience on this page?’.
3. What connects the drop-off point with my marketing goals?
Once a visitor reaches the end of their journey on a website they’re invested but something is stopping them from converting. Whether your conversion goal is a purchase or an enquiry, you need to make sure that this action can in fact be taken.
With this in mind, as well as your understanding of your customers' needs, you can build an experience that makes it easy for them to navigate through, reach the end point and convert.
Ask yourself, “Can my visitors take the next step on the pages they are leaving?”
By digging into the cause of your exit rates, you can better understand the browsing experience of your visitors and can therefore address these to enhance your lead generation. This can also be very useful if you are about to start a website rebuild. With that in mind, we of course believe that chat can help with all aspects of this.
Whether a visitor is struggling to navigate their way through, can’t resonate with your content or is unable to take their final conversion step, chat is a perfect channel to help address any of these issues. Offering an instant solution to any hurdle they may face while building trust and satisfaction.
See our solution in action - book a 30 minute demo!
So the next time that you are tracking your monthly analytics, remember to look at the numbers with these questions in your mind. Yes, exit rate is a key metric, but why a page is leaking is more important. By taking a qualitative research approach and looking at the granular reasons behind the number, you’ll in turn have a far better analytical response to solving the leaks in your lead generation funnel.
