Tim Ash who is one of Google Adwords Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants, presents a webinar that is now available on YouTube. He shares insight into many ways Webmasters have improved their design and layout of their website to increase conversion rates.

If you are serious about doing business online then watching this video is highly recommended.

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.