Testing times for your ecommerce site?
Written 14.01.09 by: Jonathan Briggs
While high street sales are static, ecommerce is booming. So is it time to redesign your site or are there better ways of squeezing more value out of the investment you have already made? the OTHER media is using A/B testing and a thorough understanding of analytics to help our clients deliver higher conversion rates and better revenues.
Are you missing out on…
40% additional visitors?
20% higher monthly revenues?
25% higher average order value
35% more business from your regular customers?
15% lower advertising costs?
20% more sign-ups or downloads?
These additional results are available if
You understand your visitors better
You optimise your checkout processes
You treat your repeat customers differently
You improve your landing pages
You optimise your advertising
You build your online reputation
Your competitors have woken up to the importance of A/B and multivariate testing. It is much better value for money, in a recession, than completely redesigning your site, particularly as your new design might perform less well than your current site
You need to start to make continuous small improvements; testing to find out what works and what does not; just as Amazon.com does
The changes needed to your site are different from every other site; there is no magic formula; red buttons work on some sites and not on others
What’s the process?
Make sure you are measuring the correct things about your current site: fewer better metrics more often. Your current analytics tool is fine. You just need to learn to look at the right things.
Recognise that your audience is made up of different types of customer with different needs. Stop tracking your average customer and segment your customers by geography, loyalty, source media and expressed interests
Go for the low hanging fruit first; optimise your checkout process, your home pages and your landing pages. Develop hypotheses about possible barriers to business or additional support that can be offered to customers. Test these ideas using fractional multivariate testing. Implement the winning improvements confident that they generate additional value to your business.
Build audience segments proven to deliver revenue through additional advertising, search engine marketing, social media and offline activity. Replacing pay-per-click with natural search should be the long term goal of every project but requires long-term. Make sure that your site is publishing XML site maps so that every page is indexed by the search engines.
Test every part of your PPC campaigns including ad copy variations, landing pages and keywords. Feed the results into your reputation building campaigns.
Make further improvements to your home and landing pages to deliver different and more appropriate customer journeys for each of your audience segments: cater for the browsers, the hunters, the impatient and the wary.
A/B test factors in your new site elements and monitor their effect to drive further increases in your revenue.
Provide enhanced service for your regular visitors through email marketing, their own landing pages and personalised promotional offers. A/B test these components to make sure that your communications and promotions are performing as well as possible.
Repeat often, as markets, competitors, trends and web expectations change.
How can the OTHER media help?
- Running workshops to define KPIs and audience segments
- Setting up advanced tracking and tracking of goals short of purchase
- Designing and running fractional multivariate tests
- Designing and running optimised pay-per-click campaigns
- Generating intelligence against key performance indicators
- Reseraching, designing and managing reputation building campaigns to reduce long term marketing costs