Website Conversion Blog
Back in the early days of ecommerce, visitor conversion was a really hot topic, and while most ecommerce teams continue to keep an eye on conversion, it’s not been a hot topic for a while. The beleaguered online marketer has been working hard to keep his or her head above water dealing with the shift of advertising dollars online, the nuances of search optimization, and distracted by A/B content testing, behavioral targeting and a hundred other wizzy approaches.
But in harder economic times, we all turn back to basics. Over the holiday period, while bricks and mortar channels suffered from poor like-for-like sales and discount induced margin erosion, online channels for many businesses showed healthy growth rates.
Businesses have responded by focusing investments in the online channel, and shifted marketing investments online. In harder times our marketing dollars have to work harder, reflected in changes in the mix, for example banner advertising dollars shifting to organic and paid search.
As ecommerce executives have re-evaluated the new economic landscape, conversion is now right in focus. Getting prospects to the site is still critical, but if you can change the conversion ratio by only a small amount then the returns can be dramatic.
And let’s face it, onsite conversion is still very poor, averaging 31%, i.e. less than a third of those that start a basket process completes it resulting in a sale (source: http://index.fireclick.com). That means that 69% on average abandon, with as many as 83% abandoning in the Fashion and Apparel sector. There’s clearly lots of scope here to make a significant impact and drive more revenue. So how do you start?
There are many different approaches to optimizing conversion: landing page content, the detail of the promotional offer, pricing and competitive positioning, making sure you’re not promoting products that are out of stock etc. All of these (and many more) are indicative of a myriad of potential causes of abandonment, illustrating the difficulty in identifying which levers you need to pull to make an impact.
Being a data driven guy, I always start with numbers. The old adage applies: If you can’t measure it, you certainly can’t manage it, and there’s no doubt that you need to measure conversion.
When it comes to measuring conversion, there are many different flavors, which is one of the reasons that it is difficult to compare conversion metrics between businesses.
What you measure is very important. I presented on this subject in some depth during a SeeWhy online executive briefing ‘Conversion Academy’ which you can see a recording of here
Most companies today do not have a complete view of conversion and abandonment. Do you even measure abandonment, for example?
To explain this in a bit more detail let’s just think about the dimensions involved:
-What are you measuring (how you define conversion, abandonment)
-How frequently you measure it (continuously, hourly, daily, weekly etc)
-The level at which you take measurements – every product, every page, every transaction step, every traffic source, each individual customer, or at some level of aggregation)
-How you are analyzing it (are you comparing like with like, and using ‘rolling time’ or fixed intervals like today, yesterday)
We’ve found that measuring it at the lowest level of granularity, and in real time is essential in determining exactly where and when there is a problem. This really sums up the difference between reporting and monitoring.
Traditional click analytics will show you, if you choose to look, that conversion was down yesterday but it’s often hard to get a meaningful picture from a single day. The trend is undoubtedly the best indicator, perhaps over a week since a single data point can be misleading.
Monitoring, of course is providing different information in a complimentary way: measurement is done continuously, not in end of day batches, which means that you pick up emerging trends much faster. Using rolling time periods (i.e. the previous 6 hours from any moment in time) gives you a very different picture from a static dashboard updated yesterday. This allows proactive alerts to tell you when there’s a problem, immediately pinpointing the source of the problem.
Real time conversion monitoring also allows you to tune your site much more effectively since you can see the effect of any changes you make almost immediately, enabling you to play the many different levers that affect conversion.
