How to Learn Why Users Abandon Your Website

Getting people to your website is only really half the battle. This is something you already know far too well. With the right search engine optimization and marketing, you can get people to click on your links and visit your website any day of the week. You might even have steady, regular, dependable traffic from the work that you have already done.

But are those people sticking around once they find your website? When they click on your link, do they actually stay on your website and convert into a subscriber, customer, client, etc.? If not, do you know why they are leaving your website?
This is something that a lot of websites have to contend with. Not only do you have to be concerned about how quickly they leave your website after clicking on a link, you have to be concerned about what they do once they get to that website. Knowing why people bounce from your website can help you build a better website that fewer people will want to leave.
Of course, you can’t convince everyone, all the time. Lots of people are going to visit your website and leave without converting. But there are ways that you can convince the people that would have converted, if they had stayed on your website, to stick around. And it all starts with learning why they abandon your website in the first place. Here’s how to learn why users abandon your website:

1. Clicktale

If you’re looking for ways to track the movement of users on your website, this is one of the best tools available. Like many tools on this list, it uses heat maps to see where people are spending the most time, what they are clicking on, what they are reading, and, perhaps more importantly, what they are not clicking on, looking at, or reading. This tool has a wide variety of tools, including the ability to see where people are most likely to convert, where they are dropping off of your website, and what your conversion funnels look like. It may also be able to tell you where they are hitting roadblocks, even if they are trying to convert.

2. Bounce Exchange

Sometimes, you might not be as concerned about getting new visitors to engage, but, instead, about keeping current customers engaged. This is where a tool like Bounce Exchange can help. If someone has already been on your website for a while, this tool can help you create a system that will keep them from clicking out of your website. For example, it might put a popup on your page if it senses that the user is moving their mouse towards the ‘x’ on the tab. There are lots of customization options that makes it easy to personalize the experience for each user.

3. Hotjar

This tool is by far one of the best for tracking users on your site and understanding why they leave it. It has eight separate metrics that you can look at, all measured by heat maps, not unlike the ones that Clicktale uses. You’ll see what they are clicking on, where they are scrolling, and even where they are moving their mice. You’ll see what is getting attention and, perhaps more importantly, what is not getting attention.

4. iPerceptions

Are you looking for a way to get real time feedback from your visitors themselves? If so, this is a great tool to use. It can be put on any page of your website, and gives your visitors the opportunity to provide you with their thoughts, comments, or feedback on your website. It can also allow you to decide what to ask, based on what has already been answered by that visitor.

5. UserTesting

If you want to find out what’s wrong with your website before you even start sending visitors to that website, this is a company that sends people to your website and, in video-recorded sessions, tells you exactly what they are experiencing when they visit your website. They are given a specific list of tasks to do, and they evaluate your website based on how easy to difficult it is to do that task. Keep in mind that you want most tasks to be very easy. Make something difficult, and they are more likely to navigate away, rather than stick around and try to figure it out.

6. Olark

A survey is a good place to start if you want to learn what your visitors like or do not like about your website, but Olark provides you with a chat function that allows you to reach out to specific users and ask them not just if they need help, but what they think of your website.