10 Ecommerce tips - Emetrics London 2010

Editor's Notes

1. Hands – How many people have heard of “conversion rate marketing” – understand what it means? For those that don’t – conversion rate marketing is about increasing the number of direct sales or leads, or reducing costs by getting your customers to take action on line instead. Has anyone thought about this? In this room right now? (hands)
2. Numbers from 2009 (Nielsen) Jan – number of orders from total visitors to the site. Site numbers from compete.com Schwans (groceries) – 52% of 300K people per month – Sales value average $30 - $4,680,000 per month ProFlowers – sells flowers – 27.3% of 550K – AOV of $40 - $6 million per month. Office Depot, selling technology, office supplies and furniture – 21.1% of 4.75M people @ $75 (conservative) - $75Million per month Big Daddy of them all – Amazon 17.2% of 70M conservative $166* AOV - $2Bn per month!! *estimated based on figures from 2009 Amazon runs 200 tests every day 365 days of the year. Do you? (hands) 3 major things that contribute to conversion
3. Is it easy to buy a product from you? (Amazon CRM example) Are there stumbling blocks along the way that make it difficult for your visitors to take action? (Netanttila – photography example) Is it possible that your business could do things (simple things) to make it easier for your visitors? (Anne Holland – Whichtestwon - As seen on CNN resulted in a 40% lift in registrations for RealAge – age assessment and health site) Are the call to actions clear? Is there a clear finish line?
4. Persona’s scent trails Are you offering your visitors what they want? Or what you want to sell? Are they finding you from the right places? Is your content relevant to the needs of your visitors? Are you speaking to the dog in a language the dog understands? The dog understands steak tastes good and smells great when cooked. Not that it’s a carbohydrate comprised mainly of fat, cholesterol and protein. Do you understand and cater for different audiences? With different backgrounds, needs and desires?
5. Are the signals there? Clear signals that lots of other customers want/use or have bought the product/service? Testimonials/Star ratings? Shopping carts – Is it easy to see what to do next? On shopping carts - Credit cards? SSL? Guarantees? Shipping costs early? 3 things; Do you make it easy? Are you focusing on the right people? Do you help people make decisions? I can’t tell everyone here how to do those 3 things… There is no magic wand but hopefully you can take some of these tips to the bank.
6. Using Google (ask your vendor for the same reports) Bounce rates & Exit rates (explain) Ok so 1 in 5 of this customers website is leaving without doing anything and 1/7 roughly exit. Use averages as a benchmark 10,076 pages Higher bounce rate than 21.5%? On pages with more than 10000 visits per month? (otherwise you’ll be wasting your time on low traffic high bounce pages)
7. Once the filter is applied you get a list of pages higher than 21% bounce rate – These are pages that you are making it more difficult than the average page for whatever reason. Now you have a list of 78 pages where people are bouncing higher than average. You’re now looking at your first testing points heuristic and user experience tests should be carried out. Find pages which bounce lower than 21% and compare to the high bouncing pages on this list. Exactly the same thing is applied with exit rate (use exit rate variables in filters)
8. The classic shopping funnel. Worst abandonment points circled. The biggest dark lines . This is where you’re making it the most difficult for the potential customer This is where you begin heuristics and testing programs . Have you created enough trust? – Amazon doesn’t need to any more but they still do. Do you know which credit cards are acceptable? Shipping information up front? Security? (Lock with a check mark on client 40% better click through) Who else has bought? Testimonials to service? What is difficult about your product? Are you answering concerns?
9. There are literally dozens of traffic optimization techniques but I want to focus on 2 that you’re likely to be able to find Keyword optimization Segmentation So with keywords as shown high conversion in the long tail. So how do you find the “long tail” in Google analytics? (and again same applies to all tools)
10. 38,889 keywords. Where do you start? As a side note, has anyone however noticed the first encouraging sign? The bounce rate from people coming to the websites from a keyword is lower than average (remember 21%). filter out the best keywords . Low hanging fruit. Buy traffic you’re not paying for and not ranking in Google that converts highly. Create a keyword list Advanced Filters. Keywords about the brand excluded, 10% conversion or higher and with more than 20 visits.
11. Anyone notice my mistake? Hands? Only 5 keywords that converted above 10% had more than 20 visits, so I reduced the visit number to 5. This gives 36 key phrases, currently not being paid for, that can be put into Google Adwords and should by rights convert at around 10%. Only 618 visits here. But imagine the conversions if you could drive 6000 visits from those 36 keywords. Notice engagement is very high. Page views per session is high. Time on site is high. This is high value traffic.
12. Segmentation – Not all traffic is created equal! There is no such thing as an average visitor as I think I’ve proved by showing you the filters. Engaged segment in Google (more than 10 page views and more than 5 minutes on site). As you can see engaged visits make up the lions share of conversions so attracting more of these people makes sense and knowing where they come from (or where they don’t) is key to this. By then looking at the simple traffic acquisition report keywords in Google you can see the keywords and as before start using them to attract the right traffic.
13. Add to Cart, Add to Shopping Cart, Add Item(s) to Cart, Add to Basket,  Buy,  Buy Now, Add to Bag,  Add to Shopping Bag,   Add Item(s) to Bag,   Add to My Bag, Add to My Brown Bag! Testing tips – Calls to action Who does this?  - The point test what works. Myriads of colors, myriads of texts, some with Icons some not. How to measure? Click through rates of different versions. Client – Teliasonera – grey buttons that looked smart when changed to green made a huge improvement in CTR and bottom line conversion    
14. What do I do next? Is it going to take forever to buy? The first is fastest The second is more reassuring The third has everything but takes longer. All three are helping me make a decision to some respect.
15. Testing tips – Social proof or testimonials. Who has used something like Tripadvisor before booking a hotel? Hotel glo – 279 reviews. How to measure? Click through rates of different versions. 189 reviews and 4.5 stars must mean a damn good book. An actual quote from a happy customer is even better. B2B - Logos of clients at least with a few references from them. Better than this is a written description of what was achieved for clients like this. How to measure? How many conversions come after reading a case study? Or accessing the references page.
16. Use SMO to help further facilitate discussion about your brand or services. Increase your linkability Make tagging and bookmarking easy Reward inbound links Help your content travel Encourage the mashup (possibility of merging technologies) Example; Levi Friends Store (via facebook Like) My friends birthdays. And if I had friends that had bought these jeans they would appear in the Levi store.
17. Monetize the outcomes. Monetize the potential. Monetize the loss. Compare cost to acquisition. (CPA, CPC, CPM) When talking to management bigger numbers are better! All sites can be monetized but E-Commerce is the easiest. Find the average order value – euro value of all purchases/number of purchases. Potential value is then AOV * all visits The realistic measure is closer to the tables shown Improve cart abandonment by 5% it’s worth €2M a quarter. Improve bounce rate by 10% and the value of 1% of those converting is €225K per quarter.
18. Questions