Optimizing your e-commerce site
We strongly believe that an optimization approach will allow you to better spend your marketing budget to drive more performance. Today, digital ad costs represent a significant part of the budget. I won’t go on about the importance of targeting the right audiences and having a media strategy, since my colleagues have already done that. Instead we’ll look at how collaboration between digital advertising and targeted optimization can take you a long way.
Essentially, this work consists, first of all, of concentrating on paid traffic and where it comes from. If you can improve this, then statistically conversions will be higher, which means higher revenue and therefore a better quality ROAS. That’s why you should never neglect the CX aspect of your digital strategy, and focus on allocating your budget efficiently. For example, if your goal is to increase revenue by X%, it doesn’t make sense to buy more ads to drive more visits. Instead the metric you focus on should be your conversion rate. By increasing the conversion rate by just 0.1%, your revenue will grow – without investing more money in media placements. It’s not always enough to attract more people to your platform, sometimes it pays more to focus your attention on converting those who are already there.
Of course, optimization isn’t limited to traffic acquired through paid campaigns, it applies to all your sessions. Your approach can be generic (all sessions) or segmented, based on a variety of dimensions such as acquisition source, type of device, localization, etc. It all depends on your goals and situation.
How does it work? It’s simple, it all rests on your insights. Essentially, your optimization activities are based on data, which echoes your goals. Going back to our example of the revenue increase, we would want to analyze the user journey (either globally or by segment) to figure out the barriers to purchase. Other methodologies can also help us understand why visitors buy your products; these insights are equally useful when it comes to the optimization process.
As I mentioned, we use whatever data is available, between Google Analytics, heat maps and session recordings (Hotjar), keywords used, etc. This raw data is then deepened and transformed into insights that can be used to come up with optimizations and hypotheses.
At this point it’s easy to put the optimization in place, along with A/B testing to measure the real impact your changes have.
Though testing is encouraged, it’s not required, particularly for optimizations that have already proven themselves, or that follow best practices for digital or those laid out by other UX/CX studies.
It’s worth taking a moment to list out a few optimizations you can put in place with very little effort (labour or cost) and that, we hope, can help you in your fourth quarter.
Specific front-end modifications
- Graphic modifications: changes to your site’s CSS can have a positive impact, and can be done with extensions like CSS Hero or page builders like Elementor. Changes can be made to the size of elements, colours, shapes, fonts, etc.
- Integration of micro-interactions or animations within your site: interactions are effective, as they give the user feedback about their actions and contribute to a positive experience on the site. The most common of these are hover animations, indication that you’ve reached the end of a horizontal scroll, the activation of a CTA, loading, etc.
- Hierarchy of calls to action: depending on your goals, it makes sense to rank your CTAs. Essentially, your main CTAs should be the most easily identifiable by the user through shape or colour. Primary CTAs reflect the actions you most want users to take, like adding an item to a shopping cart or checking out.
- Think about accessibility: accessibility standards are numerous and earning an A+ for conformity throughout your site is nearly impossible, so it makes sense to prioritize. Do an assessment of the most important pages of your site to begin with (product pages, checkout) using an evaluation tool like WCAG contrast checker for contrast and font size. The minimum contrast ratio to meet standards is 4.5:1. This ratio goes down if your font is larger, either 18pt or 14pt in bold.
Page restructuring
- Information hierarchy: using insights, it’s possible to modify the elements on a page without modifying the entire site. Like with Lego blocks, you can adjust the position of information by moving blocks around to adapt the page to users’ needs.
- Adding basic functionalities: some are musts for e-commerce. You can integrate functionalities using pre-existing modules like the ones to save a shopping cart through Shopify, Prestashop and others. If no module exists, you can evaluate how relevant the functionality is given the needs of your visitors.
- Reworking content: you can improve the quality or relevance of your visuals, and you can update textual information to be more specific, and also optimize organic search.
Optimize for mobile
The use of mobile for online shopping is growing endlessly. In 2019, Statistica estimated that by the end of 2021, 73% of online sales would be completed on a mobile device. We start our research on our mobile phones (whether or not we set out with the intention to buy) because these devices are at the tips of our fingers at all times. What’s more, to optimize the performance of paid traffic the key thing, at least in my opinion, is to have a mobile-first site (or at least a mobile-first buyer’s journey). Essentially, the greatest share of your traffic by device, for paid social acquisition sources, is mainly mobile.
- Streamline your content: limited screen sizes mean you need to simplify your layout, removing anything that isn’t absolutely necessary for the user. A small header lets you leave room for what’s really important for your visitors (menu and shopping cart), you can integrate content into closed accordion menus to create space in product files, and horizontal scrolling is very big right now and allows you to gain back vertical space on the page.
- Adapt touch targets: calls to action should be a minimum of 44px high to facilitate interactions
- Font size: to maximize readability, we recommend a minimum font size of 12 points for paragraph copy to reduce eye strain and cognitive load. A word of advice, when picking your fonts, avoid going in for choices that prioritize design over information processing.
- Make search easy: with the menu being 99% a hamburger menu, placing the search bar in a prominent location allows visitors to easily orient themselves.