How customer reviews can lower bounce rates, increase conversion rates, and improve ROI

Bounce rates — the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page — can have an enormous impact on your marketing and conversion rates. So why don’t businesses pay more attention to them? Particularly when there are some easy fixes to help improve them.

There are a few different reasons why bounce rates might be high, but they all boil down to whether or not your visitors are confident that your site or business are worth their time. For a visitor looking to make a purchase, this can mean that they quickly make the decision that there’s a better alternative for them out there.

This is especially true for someone shopping for a type of purchase they haven’t made before, where they don’t have previous experiences with you or your competitors. They’re looking to evaluate different alternatives quickly and if they’re bouncing, your site has not made the cut. 

That’s why customer reviews can be such a great deterrent to high bounce rates. The more prominently you can display your customer reviews, the more quickly they will see that you’re proud to show off how your customers feel about you. That will make them feel like it’s worth it to stick around. And that’s all it takes. Once you get them to stick around for a minute or two, then your products and services can do the rest. 

The Trustpilot effect on bounce rates

When it comes to the effect Trustpilot reviews have on bounce rates, you don’t need to take our word for it. Our customer Flowers.ie saw a 22% decrease in bounce rate, just from implementing our review widgets across their homepage and key landing pages. And that’s just one example. Trust signals inspire the confidence needed to ensure visitors that land on your site stay on your site. 

Best practices for decreasing bounce rates using customer reviews

Bounce rate comes down whether or not your homepage has made the argument that your site is worth a visitor's time. Including your Trustpilot elements near the top of your homepage — and any key pages your visitors tend to land on — ensures they see them before it’s too late. This helps you immediately see positive changes to your bounce rates. Flowers.ie displays theirs right below their hero image so that the green stars immediately catch your eyes. And any visitors quickly get a glance of how their customers feel about their business, before they even look at any specific products. 

Conversion rate optimization to improve sales for the visitors that don’t bounce

Once you’ve decreased your bounce rate and improved the amount of visitors that are staying on your site, Trustpilot reviews have an even more impressive impact on your conversion rates. 

European fashion retailer Cruyff saw a 32%+ increase by including a Trustpilot widget to their checkout page. And when they tested product review widgets on their product pages, customers added 12% more items to each cart because of the confidence those customer reviews gave them. 

When Scrum.org added Trustpilot widgets to their site, their conversion rate increased by 27%. As a bonus, they also saw an impressive 39% increase in website sessions, showing the power Trustpilot can have in growing your brand and helping new customers find your business.

Best practices for maximizing conversion rates with customer reviews

To have the biggest impact on conversion rates, your reviews need to be placed throughout your customer journey. But the area where they have the most impact is near your CTAs. By the time a customer has arrived there, they’re definitely interested in your product or service. 63% of EU consumers agree that a good Trustpilot score makes them more likely to buy from a brand, so including your score or reviews right by your CTA helps give them that final push to complete your customer journey. 

French retailer Mobilier Deco includes their customer reviews on all of their key pages to build trust with shoppers and increase conversions each step of the way.

Not all reviews are created equal 

Customer reviews can have a huge impact on both bounce rates and conversion rates. They even have a positive impact on customer loyalty and retention. But how you present them — and how you’ve collected them — does matter. Using a third party platform is key. 

Consumers tend to place less and less faith in reviews that you’ve sourced and posted yourself. And if you’ve collected them with a review platform that is known for hiding or manipulating negative reviews for business, chances are visitors to your site may be aware of that and see through it as well.

Trustpilot has multiple policies in place to keep reviews on our platform as trustworthy as possible — we have fraud detection software to automatically remove fake reviews and we block accounts that repeatedly post fake reviews or misuse our platform.  

Many of today’s consumers have trust issues. They want to be able to click away from your site and see the full picture of your customer reviews, not just the ones you’ve chosen to show them. And 61% of EU consumers say a good Trustpilot score makes them more likely to trust a brand. Collecting and displaying your reviews with Trustpilot helps give your visitors the confidence they need to convert. 

We all think of customer reviews as a great way to improve customer experience — which, of course, they are — but many businesses don’t realize what a massive impact they can have on your bounce rates, conversion rates, sales, and ROI. The businesses that have the most success with Trustpilot realize the marketing power these reviews have. And they use them throughout each part of their customer journey. 

Request a demo today to learn more about how Trustpilot can improve your bounce rates and conversion rates.