Long Tail Economics is about diversifying products and services in order to sell less of more. Doing this increases the amount of options to appeal to more customers. However, diversifying your product line and content often creates more opportunities for users to get lost on a website. Users that don’t quickly find the products, services, or content that they are looking for will seldom spend time fishing for the right page. More than likely, your customers will hit the back button and search elsewhere for their intended targets. A high bounce rate ultimately results in missed revenues.

Improving the user experience on your website serves both you and your users.

What does this mean for websites?

eCommerce:

Delivering the best products at the cheapest prices will drive traffic. However, price and product selection are just parts of what creates a sticky eCommerce site. Here the user experience is greatly measured by the ease of finding products and information about products. Difficulty finding this information will result in bounce back. Furthermore, delivering products that compliment and support the user’s selection provides both increased revenues and a more complete product offering.

Marketing/Lead Generation:

50% of website visitors leave after the first click. Companies continue to spend big bucks on driving traffic to their website without giving the same attention to conventions keeping their users from leaving. A website must have dynamic and robust mechanisms in place to effectively determine the intent of visitors. Delivering the right content, downloads, or forms increases conversion rates significantly and decreases the bounce rate.

Support:

Enhancing customer self-service websites reduces customer support cost in addition to providing a complete customer experience. While maintaining a substantial amount of content is important, ensuring the timely consumption of relevant content drastically reduces bounce rate by empowering your users.