During the time that I have been working with analytics, I have noticed a repetitive issue with forms and high bounce rates. The majority of my clients are service oriented and those who have analytics in place allow for a good evaluation of site exit points and pages with high bounce rates. Usually it is the form page that causes visitors to leave.

Frustration is the #1 cause for a user leaving a site -if the form is too long and/or asks for too much personal information. Also, irritating questions that require heavy typing can certainly lead to visitor frustrations that may result in abandonment. Clients who have made it all the way to your form page are definitely interested in your service/s and/or products. Don’t allow a bad form page to scare them away.

Let’s see what we can do in order to keep our visitors happy and wanting to fill out forms for us:

1) Align the fields in an organized way so everything is clean looking and easy to understand.
2) Keep it short-ask only for information that is necessary for a completion of the request.
3) Eliminate heavy typing- a drop down menu is a great solution.
4) Try to eliminate login and password creation to save time.

With these simple steps, you will be able to hold on to your prospects and reduce your bounce rates dramatically!

At the recent WebmasterWorld Conference in Las Vegas, I attended a few sessions about optimizing e-commerce sites. I will summarize the takeaways in this blog.

Acquiring traffic and driving sales are two different processes that need to be considered. The most common reasons for people leaving a site are: the user intent is not met, poor page design, and dead links. You should look at the search terms that are driving traffic and try to discern what the visitor is expecting of that query, and make sure the content matches that intent.

It is also about the formatting of the content. Be consistent in navigation and use recognized naming conventions, don’t get cute.

There should be multiple navigation options: primary navigation, a site map and an internal site search utility. The internal site search can dramatically increase conversions. This function is also great for reporting the most popular searches & allows customization of search results. Create a custom search. For instance, if there is something you don’t have, instead of yielding 0 results, show similar items that might be of interest.

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