PRODUCT MANAGEMENT CASE STUDY ON HOW TO REDUCE BOUNCE RATE
How we managed to bring down the bounce rate of mobile traffic from 61% to 22%
And why Progressive Web App(PWA) was chosen over a native mobile app
This case study showcases how below-mentioned aspects of Product Management were put into action to solve a problem:
- Problem Identification
- Data Analysis
- Decision making
- Defining and monitoring success metrics
A little flashback…
I was working with a luxury fashion e-commerce which was really in bad shape in terms of user experience because of multiple issues.
To list the major ones:
- The UI was very primitive
- The page load time was as high as 20 seconds
- It was not optimised even for basic on-page SEO
- It was not mobile responsive
These are a few which were having a visible impact on the user experience. Apart from these, there were hundreds of other technical issues which were having an indirect impact. There was no structured tech architecture in place, the data was not organised and the code was a mess.
The overall effect of all these factors was that the users who were visiting the website were not sticking and hence not converting.
Below snap shows the bounce rates of mobile and desktop at that time:
We decided to fix those issues first which had a direct impact on the user experience.
- The UI was revamped.
- The Database was restructured and queries were optimised to render the data faster, hence improving the page load time.
- Pages were optimised for basic on-page SEO
- The website was made mobile responsive
The expected result was that the bounce rate would drop and conversions will increase. But did that happen for all the users?
…and the story begins…
After the basic revamp of the UI there was some improvement as the number of transactions increased. However, as I have stated in this article that monitoring the results closely is very important, we rechecked the bounce rates.
Below snap shows the bounce rates of mobile and desktop after the changes got stabilised:
The bounce rate from desktop dropped by almost 22% however there was no change in the bounce rate from mobile devices.
And hence the problem remained partially solved and we needed another plan to tackle it.
By this time, most of you must be thinking — Why not build an app?
Well, to answer that I would want to highlight a few points about the nature of the business:
- the e-commerce website is for luxury fashion
- The average order value (AOV) is quite high, between Rs 17,000 to Rs 25,000
- The frequency of repeat purchases is not similar to normal fashion e-commerce websites
- Major purchase is occasion driven- people buy only when they have any occasion to attend to like wedding, party, festivals etc
A mobile application makes more sense when the frequency of its usage by the users is high. The decision to build an app just to tackle the problem of bounce rate would have not been a wise one as there are other factors to be considered:
1) Building an app would have required additional tech resources, which means additional cost
2) Because of the products being sold have high price, people don't purchase casually and there is no impulse buying. We had observed that although traffic through mobile devices was high, still the conversion rate from desktop had always remained better than that from mobile.
We couldn’t have spent an additional amount to reduce the bounce rate without being sure that it will translate into an increase in transactions.
As a Product Manager, the job is not to make products without being clear about the end goal, which in this case was to increase transactions from mobile devices. So, in order to improve the user experience, we had to think of an alternate solution and after basic research, we had one- Progressive Web App or PWA.
What is a Progressive Web App?
A Progressive Web App is a website that is developed to make the mobile experience much more pleasant than a standard mobile-optimized site. A PWA provides the user with an experience of a native app without utilising the resources like the memory of their phones.
Below are the few benefits of PWA:
- It is Cost-Effective in terms of development and maintenance.
- It is Cross-platform which means separate versions are NOT required for android and iOS.
- It is Reliable as it loads faster even in uncertain network conditions and consumes less data than a regular native mobile app.
- It is SEO discoverable as search engines identify PWAs.
- It is as Engaging as a native app since it supports push notifications.
After learning these benefits of PWA, we were sure about what we needed to do to improve the user experience of our mobile users. As mentioned earlier the development didn’t require any major architectural change. We just needed to separate the front end from the backend and add PWA by powering it through APIs.
We acted immediately and after finalising the design, the development took just a month. After thorough testing, we released the PWA which was rendered based on the type of user-agent, which was used to identify if the device being used by the user is a desktop or mobile.
To give you an idea, how the mobile website used to look and how it looked after implementing PWA, below are 2 snapshots:
The UI looks better but what happened to the bounce rate?
See for yourself:
The bounce rate from mobile devices dropped to ~22%. Not only that, after a few months we observed a substantial increase in the conversion rate from mobile devices.
To summarize, this case study highlights the various aspects that a product manager needs to keep in mind while working on the solution to a problem. The goal should not be just to solve the problem, it should be to solve the problem while keeping in mind the nature of the business, the behaviour of users and the availability of resources as well.
