Testing and optimizing an ecommerce website for higher conversion rates is one of the most important drivers of online business success. With countless elements impacting the customer journey, narrowing focus on key areas can mean the difference between mediocre and accelerated growth. In this comprehensive blog post, we’ll thoroughly explore five of the most critical question areas for unlocking productivity via conversion rate optimization. Properly evaluating website performance, user experience, funnel friction points and more creates a roadmap to boosting profits.
The user experience (UX) refers to how easy, enjoyable, and intuitive an e-commerce site is for customers to navigate and make purchases. Assessing UX holistically reveals pain points across the buyer journey that can be streamlined to reduce friction. This involves evaluating factors like site speed, navigation, on-page content, visuals, responsiveness, and more.
Does the site provide an effortless mobile experience across the full catalog and pages?
Can visitors easily navigate categories, search for products, view details, and purchase via smartphones?
Is the checkout process convenient and optimized for smaller screens?
Is navigating the site menu and finding relevant pages simple and clear?
Does the information architecture make sense to new visitors?
Can visitors conveniently access key site sections like account pages, specials, etc?
How fast do site pages load across connections and devices?
Are there opportunities to improve image compression, caching, and hosting for faster loads?
Can excess plugins or features be removed to optimize speed?
Are product photos, videos, and descriptions engaging and illustrative?
Does content adequately communicate product benefits, features, and uses clearly?
Can visuals and copy be refined to better captivate visitors?
By comprehensively assessing UX, retailers can pinpoint usability obstacles that may be sabotaging conversion optimization efforts. Identifying and correcting pain points is invaluable.
Conversion optimization cannot happen in a vacuum. It’s imperative to analyze overall site performance by quantifying traffic, sales revenue, conversion metrics, and related KPIs. This contextualizes understanding of what’s working well and which areas need improvement for accelerated business growth.
Specific performance questions include:
What are the main traffic sources, volumes, and trends year-over-year?
How much of the traffic comes from organic vs paid sources?
Are overall site visits climbing or plateauing over time?
How often do visitors return and how many pages do they view per session?
How long are visitors staying on site and how does this trend over time?
Can visitor loyalty and on-site engagement be improved?
What % of visitors ultimately convert into paying customers?
Is the conversion rate above, below, or on par with ecommerce benchmarks?
Are overall transactions and revenue totals growing sufficiently?
Pinpointing shortcomings amongst key performance indicators provides an objective overview of where conversion optimization can provide the biggest commercial lift.
Pinpointing which specific pages and elements on an e-commerce site convert visitors most rarely presents huge upside potential. Sorting product category pages, landing pages, blog content, and other sections by conversion rate quickly highlights the worst performers.
Questions around lower-converting areas include:
Page-Specific Conversion Optimization
Which blog posts, product pages, and content pages have the lowest conversion rates?
What are the likely reasons fewer visitors convert to these pages?
What page elements, friction points, or lack of clarity cause shoppers to abandon?
Feature or Function Conversion Weaknesses
Are there site features that few visitors utilize such as customization or wish lists?
Can superior features be made more visible and simpler to increase usage?
Why do so few visitors convert after engagement with specific functionalities?
Uncovering why certain pages fail to convert gives product, UX, and marketing teams actionable problem areas to systematically refine and improve. Quick site wins can then scale across other pages over time.
Proactively confirming an optimized customer journey requires exacting on-site testing. This evaluates if visitors intuitively navigate pages, locate products, self-serve answers, and checkout without hindrances. Site testing is invaluable for revealing usability obstacles that may deter conversion goals.
Important journey testing questions include:
Can first-time visitors easily find relevant products using navigation and search?
Is the site architecture intuitive enough for visitors to self-discover related products?
How easily can visitors set up a customer account and log in?
Are there any speed bumps during registration that users struggle with?
Checkout Process Testing
Proactive on-site testing provides early visibility into customer journey sticking points that may only emerge at scale later. Pinpointing areas for simplification by witnessing user struggles firsthand through testing and heat maps solves issues.
Benchmarking questions include:
What % of category web traffic does my business attract vs key competitors?
Does slower growth in visits over time signal site experience limitations?
Do customers rate competitor sites higher than mine for experience quality?
Where does my site fall short on satisfaction metrics that may deter buyers?
Do key rivals demonstrate higher rates of converting site visitors into customers?
What underlying website strengths may be driving superior conversion performance?
Confirming competitive standing helps set the bar for the level of customer experience and performance required to stand out rather than blend in. This provides tangible direction for conversion optimization goal-setting.
Delivering an excellent user experience may be the most important foundation for fostering e-commerce conversions over the long term. If customers find your website confusing, slow, difficult to navigate, or lacking engagement during shopping journeys, it directly damages motivation to purchase. Let's explore UX evaluation in more detail across key dimensions.
Optimizing site navigation revolves around ensuring customers can easily traverse primary and secondary pages to reach desired categories and products. Best practices include:
Intuitive Information Architecture: Organize site sections using categories and descriptive headers that make inherent sense to visitors. Conduct card sorting tests with users to confirm or refine architecture.
Predictive Search: The site search bar should produce predictive suggested results as visitors type to point them to relevant pages quickly.
Persistent Navigation Menu: Maintain consistent primary and secondary navigation menus across all pages so visitors avoid getting lost.
Sitemaps: Include sitemaps documenting all pages to facilitate visitor wayfinding for conversion goals.
Navigation testing reveals sticking points - watch newcomer visitor recordings to ensure intuitive access.
Confirming blazing-fast page load speeds is mandatory to avoid abandonment. 53% of mobile site visitors will desert pages taking over 3 seconds to load. Various optimizations should be enacted:
Compress Images: Compress all photos without compromising visual quality to enable faster loading.
Minify Site Code: Clean up bloated code through minification plugins to streamline page sizes.
Limit needless Plugins: Each unnecessary plugin slightly inflates page loading - be selective.
Effective Caching: Implement page caching across CDNs to recycle faster page version serving.
Faster Hosting: Upgrade to more performant database and hosting plans as traffic expands.
Page speed tools quantify improvements required to hit sub-3-second loads to curb dropoffs.
Ensuring product and content pages captivate visitors via compelling descriptions, visuals, and multimedia raises conversion likelihood.
Value-Driven Copy: Communicate tangible benefits well to visitors to prompt purchases.
Senior Model Product Photos: Showcase goods attractively worn or used by customers themselves within natural settings that buyers can relate to.
100% Accuracy: Eliminate any conflicting or inaccurate claims that may erode visitor trust.
Videos and Interactive Content: Incorporate video demos and interactive widgets to showcase product dimensionality.
The most engaging content matches target audience preferences - user test content with visitor panel feedback.
Removing all possible friction within the checkout to enable one-click seamless purchases is pivotal for conversion performance.
Fewer Fields: Only mandatory order details should be gathered without overburdening visitors.
Auto-Fill Capabilities: Allow browser auto-fill of repetitive visitor credentials to expedite checkout.
Guest Checkouts: Don't require account registration prior to purchase completion.
Distraction-Free: Keep visitors focused on finishing orders without unnecessary interruptions or cross-sells.
Progress Tracker: Display step-by-step progress e.g. "Step 1 of 3" to convey the funnel clearly.
The ultimate checkout process should enable impulse "one-click" mobile purchases in 10 seconds without any hurdles.
Web traffic metrics quantify total visibility and eyeballs on site pages via Google Analytics. It represents the upper ceiling of conversion potential.
Ensure overall site visits and buyer traffic are climbing reliably month to month. If traffic stalls out or declines, it indicates problems to remedy like technical issues, site indexing drops or paid advertising scalebacks allowing rivals to outpace organic visibility.
Benchmark traffic metrics should grow 20-50% year-over-year for most merchants. New sites should concentrate traffic on product/service pages specifically.
Engagement metrics like session duration and pages per session indicate how compelling visitors find site content and product selection.
Average session durations benchmark around 2:30 minutes across categories, increasing for more considered purchases. 7-8 pages per session balances scanability with proper opportunity showcasing by category.
Lower than-average engagement signals visitors are not finding expected themes. Redoubling content quality, personalization, and on-site search solve poor engagement fast.
Conversion rate and goal completion metrics are the purest signals of site effectiveness at compelling visitors into customers. Expect conversion rates around 2-4% generally.
Major influences on conversion performance include site trust factors, value messaging, product selection, incentives, and frictionless purchase closing.
Techniques to lift conversions include simplifying navigation, A/B testing page layouts, adding credibility elements, effective calls to action, and urgency stimulation like scarcity or expiring promotions. Delivering conversions means continually testing and optimizing based on visitor behavior insights.
Conversion underperformers are the pages, templates, and site features lagging peers in converting eyeballs to sales. Isolating these underachievers presents some of the best opportunities for quick gains via targeted improvements.
Leverage your site analytics platform to pull up-to-date reports documenting page-by-page performance on key metrics like:
Total Visits
Bounce Rates
Time on Page
Goal Completions
Sort pages descending by conversion rate or goal completions to bubble poor performers to the top for inspection. Analyze inferior pages for common deficiencies around confusing navigation, poor content quality, lack of credibility, and subpar calls to action.
Opportunities also emerge to renovate underperforming category and subcategory pages languishing relative to peer pages vying for the same traffic.
Visitor usage metrics for site tools and features like search, subscriptions, customization, and more are also occasionally surprises. Be sure to monitor:
Search queries
Wishlist additions
User customization events
Subscription sign-ups
Any tools or site capabilities demonstrating shallow customer usage present chances to lift adoption through better positioning and prominence. Alternatively replacing lesser-used features altogether for something more applicable can better serve visitors.
Visitor referral traffic analysis illuminates channels driving conversions at different rates currently such as:
Organic search
Email marketing
Social media
Affiliates
Monitoring goal completion metrics by source uncovers outperforming and underperforming traffic avenues to double down and reduce respectively going forward.
Proactive on-site testing through intentional quality assurance style user testing predicts problems and reveals obstacles before ill effects show at full scale.
Recruiting site visitors completely unfamiliar with your pages for navigational testing mirrors real onboarding challenges. Funnel newcomers through search queries, product research, account signups, and simulated checkout purchases.
Confidently ask testers to verbalize sticking points and document session recordings to spotlight confusing elements in need of refinement for seamless first-time finds.
Beyond general site flows, proactively test specialty site functionality using the same methodology with relevant users to pinpoint usage obstacles deterring visitors.
For example, test site search relevancy by assessing if various navigational and product-related queries return on-topic results consistently without dead ends.
Likewise, simulate subscription signups or loyalty program registrations to catch confusing fields and excessive requirements hampering completions.
The earlier product teams can capture usability missteps through manual testing, the faster enhancements deploy at scale - nip conversion obstacles in the bud.
Understanding the digital experience and performance your nearest competitors currently deliver across research, browsing, and buying journeys lets you calibrate site efforts effectively relative to customer expectations.
Side-by-side navigating competitor sites through common visitor goals reveals strategy and capability gaps including:
Disjointed megamenu vs categorized dropdowns
Unintuitive faceted search refinement
Page Performance Differentials
Slower page loads losing to faster React pages
Bloated images dragging vs compressed loads
Superior Feature Sets
Augmented reality tools for virtual try-on
Enriched customer photos and community content
And much more...
Document competitor strengths to set goals for delivering differentiation that nudges visitors closer to preference selection on your own pages for conversion success. Let rivals do the free research for you around winning elements.
Evaluating e-commerce site effectiveness across fundamental criteria of UX, analytics, worst performers, manual testing, and opponents set a comprehensive 360-degree analysis foundation.
From quantifying macro visitor behavior trends down to diagnosing micro page level inefficiencies, critical insights emerge on opportunities awaiting activation. The larger vision crystallizes across multiple lenses. As analysis illuminates priorities, conversion optimization evolves from guesswork to a data-driven discipline of continual reviews and improvement via testing.
Ultimately building uponsite strengths while refining weaknesses maps the incremental path to higher converting customer journeys while always keeping the end user experience central to decisions.
FAQs
What key metrics should be tracked for conversion optimization?
Key conversion optimization metrics to track include: bounce rates, pages per session, average session duration, conversion rates, average order value, revenue per visitor, and ROI from paid ads and campaigns driving traffic. Tracking changes to these metrics can quantify optimization impact.
How can I make product pages more converting?
Use compelling descriptions and beneficial bullet points, customer images, strong calls to action, situational promotion badges, peer reviews, variant options, and dynamic widgets to capture visitor attention and guide them persuasively through the conversion funnel on product pages.
What is the importance of mobile optimization?
With over 60% of ecommerce traffic now happening on mobile, having a seamless mobile experience is extremely important for reducing friction and capturing conversions from smartphones and tablets.
How can I know which pages need optimization most urgently?
Sort product and landing pages based on their conversion rates and revenue impact. Pages driving large volumes of traffic but underperforming on conversions demand the most urgent attention and testing.
Should I optimize for conversions first or higher order values?
Striking the right balance is ideal, but in most cases, optimizing for more conversions should take priority. More customers and orders ensure long term viability. After conversion rates reach healthy levels, shift focus to maximizing order values.
How do I calculate the ROI of conversion optimization?
tabulate increased revenue driven from improved conversion performance based on analytics data. Compare it to expenses invested in optimization and testing to reveal your return on investment rate.
Will A/B testing help my conversion optimization efforts?
Yes, A/B split testing different versions of site components isolates the effectiveness of changes and helps determine what resonates best with customers to lift conversions. It is an invaluable process.
How much do load speeds matter for conversions?
Dramatically - some studies show more than half of visitors will abandon sites taking over 3 seconds to load. Optimizing page speed is imperative for limiting drop-offs.
Can better branding and visuals increase conversions?
Absolutely. Well-executed visual branding boosts credibility and trust in e-commerce. Clean, consistent design also reduces cognitive load for shoppers and drives more conversions.
What tools help measure customer journey touchpoints?
Session recording tools, heatmaps, scrollmaps, form analytics, and user testing video footage help deeply analyze customer shopping journeys, revealing optimization opportunities for each step toward conversion.
