You produced a compelling new video that brings people to your site. Great. Then you notice something troubling. Visitors who come to the landing page leave almost immediately. You need a strategy to decrease bounce rates and keep visitors on your video landing page longer.
A bounce is when users visit just one page on a site and don’t go anywhere else. They don’t click any links, join your mailing list, or do anything else to engage with your content. Your bounce rate is the number of bounces divided by the total number of visitors. It’s usually shown as a percentage. A high percentage means you have a lot of bounces on your page.
Of course, every page will have some bounces. There will always be visitors who get distracted, didn’t read the link before clicking, or realize they don’t have time to watch the video at the moment. Instead of attempting the impossible, compare your stats with average bounce rates for your industry and website type. Then set a reasonable goal for your site and start working toward it.
Why are bounce rates such a big deal?
Again, every page will have some bounces, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore this metric. Your bounce rate matters because it helps you understand visitor engagement. Sure, your video can entertain people, but that’s probably not all you want it to do. If you made an investment in a video you probably want it to achieve something for you.
The importance of bounce rate goes back to the goals that inspired you to make a video in the first place. Maybe you wanted to get people excited about a product you’re selling or convince them to join your mailing list.
The ultimate goal isn’t for visitors to watch your video and then go on with their day. You want them to use this video as an entry point to engage with your website, and hopefully, take the next step.
In the context of your marketing plan, the next step might be to buy something. It could be to join your mailing list or to watch more videos. In short, the goal of a video isn’t really to get viewers, the goal is to move viewers through the marketing funnel. A high bounce rate indicates that the video isn’t doing its job.
How to decrease bounce rates
There’s no way to know exactly why visitors are leaving your page without engaging, but there are some tactics you can use to decrease bounce rates on video landing pages. Deploy these five tactics to put a dent in your bounce rate.
1. Start with a great video
If users came to your page to watch your video, it had better be worth watching. Make sure you’re capturing viewer attention in the first three seconds. Avoid splash screens and cut rambling intros to get right to the good stuff.
Keep your video as short as possible. The first thing most people do before they start a video, is check the length. Short videos have lower bounce rates because they don’t feel like such a huge time commitment.
Next, double-check sound quality and make sure your video is the right size and resolution for the page. Consider adding captions to make it easier for users to understand your video without sound.
Oh, and on the subject of sound. Do yourself a favor and turn off the autoplay feature. Few things frustrate visitors more than a video that starts blasting music the second they land on a page.
2. Make the next action obvious
Users might bounce because they’re not sure what to do next. They get to the end of your video and aren’t sure where to go from there. But they do know where the back button is. Give them something more interesting to click by including a call to action in your video. This can be a live link or an invitation to click a button or complete a page form.
Just in case viewers don’t make it to the end of your video, include the same CTA in the text of the page. If viewers know in the first 20 seconds that they love your product and want to buy, they shouldn’t have to sit through all 2-minutes of the video to do so. Add a call to action and a bright, shiny button that invites viewers to click.
3. Stay focused
It’s easy to go overboard with content. Yes, the right text can help your video rank on Google, but it’s easy to go overboard. Lots of text, multiple videos, and distracting images, can quickly overwhelm visitors. When visitors are overwhelmed, they bounce. Avoid this outcome by limiting your landing page to a single video and a few paragraphs of text. Include your CTA and call it a day.
4. Check your load times
Website visitors are impatient. Every additional second of load time increases the probability that visitors will bounce. There are many factors that influence the load speed of a specific page and even more that influence the speed of your website in general.
Google’s Page Speed Analyzer can estimate your load speed. It also offers tailored suggestions for how to speed things up. One strategy to speed up page load speeds is to host your site (and potentially even the video itself) on an extra-fast infrastructure such as LiteSpeed Server. Talk to your web developer about applying the suggested tactics.
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
It’s easy to get hyper-focused on a single web page metric, but remember that the bounce rate is just one way to monitor how your content is performing. Ultimately, all the website improvement tactics in the world won’t help unless you start with high-quality content.
For help making a video that keeps visitors on your page, contact the animation and live-action video experts at IdeaRocket.
