Engage-Digital

A butterfly beats its wings in the Mojave desert and there is a tornado in China

I’m not suggesting that web analytics is like Chaos theory but I am suggesting that seemingly small changes to a site can have big impacts.

It’s a happy but rare occurrence when one fix is so clear that by its implementation a site will be transformed from having poor performance to stellar performance. A cost / benefit analysis will help demonstrate expected return.

Grand solutions like fixing internal search, reducing basket leakage or improving retention through the checkout process are all quite obvious; alternatively driving more visits to a product page or improving conversion from product pages to the shopping basket are equally so.

These are important areas which everybody should cover off in the process of analysing a site and getting them right should yield good returns. But it is because they are so important and demand so much attention that we may be overlooking a number of other smaller, simpler and cheaper fixes that could have an equal effect on performance.

Example:
The site analytics data shows a relatively low conversion from product page to basket page and this has an impact on overall site conversion. When a customer adds an item to the shopping basket they should then automatically be taken to the shopping basket. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. Many sites assume that the customer will want to continue shopping or that he/she can be persuaded to continue shopping and so the customer is left on the product page. A look at the average number of items purchased per order or per visit will resolve that question.

I have seen conversion rates double by making this simple navigational change. In this case the decision process about whether to progress to the shopping basket or not was taken out of the customers hands. If a customer wants to continue shopping there is nothing to prevent it after arrival on the basket page.

We spend a good deal of time trying to effectively second guess what our customers want and then providing them with the options. On some occasions it may be preferable for both the customer and the e-tailer to have a decision taken by default.

There are more of these simple and extremely cost efficient fixes out there. Analysing site data gets us closer to them. Making sure we already have our analytics configured by default to measure performance on the big stuff gives us more time to explore the data for these little gems.