Reduce Bounce rate with a web presenter

You may have seen them from time to time.

These are little people that walk out into your website and start yapping to you...

Although they may appear to be annoying, they actually have some great ideas and data behind them.

Some of the benefits are;
People like to connect with other people.
By putting yourself online, it could allow customers to be more sympathetic to you and your company.

But the thing that has convinced me the most is after looking at a ad than is out performing mine on google ad words...
http://www.sitecube.com/promo_bw.asp

When I placed this ad next to mine I "considered" that most of the things that I was promising on my splash page, was hitting the same mark.

the only real difference was this idea of the web presenter.

So I set out to create one no pun style.

inspired more by
http://www.speakvisual.com/#/spotlight

than
http://flashvideodemos.com/

I set out to try and do a concept that would be unique to nopun & could try and introduce myself to the clicks i get online and try and get people to stay and not bounce!

I wanted to play with this idea of the page curl (you know show the "face" behind this website!, ha ha ha no pun intended) and having part (to show mystery) of my face behind the site.

check out the latest version I say latest because now that I know how to do it I will be tweaking it a bit until I am totally satisfied.

http://www.nopun.com/

ok so I just checked in with my web stats

aug 4th

and this is heading in the wrong direction!

I got less visitors than last week which doesn't effect this experiment...

However My bound rate increase from 60.14% to 45% !

and the average time on the site went from 02:25 minutes to 00:48 seconds!

Which is telling me people see my professional web presenter and instead of muting or pausing me they are getting the hell out... by click the close button or the back button.

So this goes back to the de-lima of does a web presenter work and I am just doing it worng or do people not like to see a website talking to you?...

My personal opinion is that no I don't want people talking to me when I visit a site, but...

i am trying to listen to the buzz of the internet that say this will be more appealing to users, you will be able to tell them your 30 second pitch! and then they will be more sympathetic to your cause because they will see a real person behind the company...

I think I will let this sit a while longer to see how the data goes, or I might prepare another attempt at my presenter.

We have to find the "trick" to decrease the bounce rate.

If someone see yours PPC ad and they are interested then they are interested... why would they then not take another actin after seeing your landing page...

Stay tuned...

as of aug 11, 2009

I checked the bounce rate stats today and it went back up a bit...

But I am not fully convinced that by adding this will decrease the bounce rate.

What I have learned through this process is that one of the most popular links is the who we are.

So my latest idea is to change the web presenter to show up after a user clicks on who we are.

I fear that I am loosing a lot of people instead of keeping them by having the web presenter load as soon as the page loads.

I am convinced that by having this presenter there it helps give a personal connection and I still think this is a good idea. But I want to tweak it a bit to see if by not letting it load as soon as the page loads will let people stay a while longer.

Basically. the time spent on the site has reduced drastically which means that the presenter may be scaring people away instead of inviting them to stay a while...

As of aug 22nd 2009

Adding the web presenter to the site really hasn't shown that big of a difference in reducing the bounce rate. If anything the time spent on the site has reduced drastically, I am thinking people get freaked out or scared by the site talking to them or they can't find the stop or mute button fast enough so they just close the site out...

So I have decided to remove the presenter from the home page.

I recently completed a project I am extremely proud of and wanted to showcase this piece on my home page, so I moved the web presenter to the "Home page"

This page is different from what you would think is the "home" page because its not the page that loads when the site first loads, (that's the index page) the home page is the page loads once someone clicks on the logo to go back "Home"

I still believe that adding a personal touch to the site is a great thing, it give personality to the site, but just adding this didn't change much, so I really have to reconsider how it was done and try a few other approaches to see if we can increase the time spent on the site less bounce rate, and get the visitor interested in viewing more pages, and coming back in the future...

as of sept 1st

I have now switched my web presenter back to the front of the site, with the index page and have removed him from the home page.

I liked the concept of a web presenter when you the home page, and maybe will consider it for a future up date

however, I have added a click to start button, so instead of the web presenter starting as soon as the page loads scaring everybody (causing massive windows closing).

I have also discovered a cool new technique for presenting your welcome message.

I was looking to do my first video blog (Vlog) and I was having trouble remembering my lines, I have this genius piece of software to use as a TelePrompTer but my number one pet peeve is when I see someone reading...

Now matter where I set the laptop up I looked like I was reading.

A friend who happens to be a TelePrompTer operator for a local TV station gave me the lowdown on how the professional systems work, they have a glass at a 45 degree angle in-front of the camera, its like magic! the words are directly in-front of the center of the camera lens.

I was able to rig up a make shift set up until I can purchase the "real" sett-up.

Boy what a big help this was, I am so inspired to not only perfect my web presenter but to start my vlogging career...

Notes on using this set up.

Be sure to clean the glass before every use.

I just finished a long session where I delivered a few great takes before realizing that the audio wasn't taking and then after the second session I realized that there where streaks from the night before.

So I would recommend using a squeegee and get in the habit of cleaning the glass before every use. Oh and also make sure the audio works!