It was bad. It was really bad. The numbers spoke for themselves. We were spending hundreds of pounds a week on Pay Per Click adverts, trying desperately to get targeted traffic to the website and after only a couple of days we had seen it: the ads weren’t the problem. The site was. Over half the traffic was leaving the website instantly. We had to take action, and we had to make a decision fast.

When your ship is sinking it can be difficult to be honest and objective. But I had to be.

I took a step back. I knew it was nothing personal. There had to be something wrong with the website. And when I took a look at it myself after so long, the answer was obvious. If it wasn’t my website, I would probably have bounced too. We made two changes.

What were the results?

An overnight decrease in bounce rate by 50%. And that wasn’t all, because as bounce rate went down, page views went through the roof. Actions increased. Goal conversions increased. And only three days later, the income started rolling in.

Here’s how we did it…
The First Fold

The first fold of the index page of ANY website, is probably the single most important part of the website that there is. It’s content is the difference between boom and bust because if your visitors don’t take action after seeing it, the rest of your website is about as pointless as a broken pencil. The first fold has one major job to do: encourage visitors to take action, any action, any other action than hitting “Back” at the top of their browser.

What We Did Right

At that time, perhaps the only thing that we did right was that we had Google Analytics installed on our site. This meant that at the very least, we could see what was going on. We could see that there was a problem. If we didn’t have Google Analytics installed, we would have been none the wiser. We would have known that we weren’t getting any orders but we wouldn’t have had the foggyist idea why.

What We Did Wrong

I looked at the front page. The first word that entered my mind was “boring”. There was nothing exciting about it. The Internet is a visual medium and while text is important, who wants to visit a website and be confronted by a block of text? It takes too long to read and the people of today simply don’t have the patience or attention span to read it without being given a good reason.

How We Fixed it

A javascript slideshow held the answer (thanks to Marghoob Suleman for the free Prestashop module). But that’s not the end of the story. Yes, it was a slideshow that we used to reduce our bounce rate so dramatically, but the power was in the slides themselves. Directed by myself, our graphic designer, David Nolan of BrightSparkCreative.com created some great slides for our website.

From my background in screenwriting I knew that on average, a viewer of a TV station makes their mind up about whether they’re going to watch a show or change the channel in about 15 seconds. So, being overly conservative, I decided that I had about 10 seconds to get our basic marketing message across.

To be most effective, this meant I had 10 seconds to do the following:

• Give visitors a subconscious belief that my website was worth looking at
• Demonstrate the ownership experience
• Prove myself trustworthy
• …and as my favourite movie director, Michael Bay says, “Grab the audience by the balls”

And that’s exactly what we did.

Since then, there’s been a pretty consistent correlation between bouncing visitors and their country of origin.