Conversion Marketing Case Study

Today we bring you a case study with an international flavour. It is an ecommerce site targeting the UK market. Their main product is household taps. They sell a variety of bathroom and kitchen taps to the UK and European markets. We are going to show you how website design can affect bounce rate.

Website: www.grandtaps.co.uk

Bounce rates on the Home Page before the design changes:
- Paid traffic: 49%
- Non-paid traffic: 33%
- Referral traffic: 50%
- Overall: 46%

Bounce rates on the Home Page after the design changes:
- Paid traffic: 13%
- Non-paid traffic: 11%
- Referral traffic: 29%
- Overall: 14%

Below is a graph of the overall bounce rate. You can see a noticeable drop on the 24th February when the new design was implemented.

In the image below we have a before and an after image.

The original design had a long list of every product offered shown on the home page. We changed this from products to categories. The photos were changed from a plain photo of the tap to one of the product being used in real life. The goal was to make the product more appealing to the visitor.

Why is a low bounce rate good?
1) It is good for Google optimisation because Google compares websites within the same industry. SO if website A has a lower bounce rate than website B, website A will have a better chance of achieving higher rankings than website B (however a low bounce rate alone will not get a website to #1 for a particular keyword/phrase, the bounce rate is just one of many factors influencing SEO).
2) A website increases the chance of a conversion, be it an online sale or just an email. All websites need to be managed and continuously tested to increase it’s chances of creating a sale,
especially now in an economic downturn. There are many tools one can use, in this case study we only used two. They were Google Analytics and a Heatmap. Another very good tool is Google Website Optimizer.

About Neil Pursey

Founder of WebGrowth, co-partner in the GROW Academy. Passionate about SEO and WordPress. Happily married to his beautiful wife.