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OPTIMIZE YOUR SITE - How to increase conversions

28 ENERO, 2020


Now that we know how to attract quality traffic to our website, we are going to see how we can work on the experience of our users when they browse our page to achieve an impact on the final conversion. In this post we will talk about how we can optimize a site at a key moment for your business, working on different conversion levers. Next, we will tell you about two strategies that can be applied to achieve an impact on this metric: optimizing the internal search engine and generating urgency in the user.





Strategy: Optimize site search


Working on and improving the performance of the site's internal search engine has a direct impact on conversion. According to Moz.com, users who use the search engine convert twice as much as those who do not use it and are more likely to return to the site with the intention of making a purchase.





What kind of actions can we perform?


1. Auto-completion of the search term.

We should make it as easy as possible to search for products. In a world where the majority of traffic browses the Internet with mobile devices, offering a well-functioning autocomplete can provide a clearly superior user experience.


2. Synonyms for the searched word.

We need to use internal knowledge about our products to provide alternative terms to what the user is looking for, especially if the search engine is able to detect that the searched word may have few results. Better yet, we must provide the system with the intelligence to be able to serve results.


3. Product recommendations.

Maybe the search engine does not manage to show the results of the product that the user has searched for. We are not perfect. However, we can take advantage of these occasions not to show an empty results page, but to provide the user with alternative options, such as best-selling products or recommendations based on their browsing history.


4. Create a results page as similar as possible to a product listing.

Finally, we should also try to make the search engine results pages as similar as possible to normal product listing pages. With this, we will achieve two objectives: on the one hand, we will offer a more cohesive experience throughout the site and, on the other hand, we will take advantage of functionalities that will help the user convert better, such as filters or product sorting.




How do we measure the success of this strategy?


Success will be determined by the quality of the searches on our site, which we will have to optimize continuously by monitoring the following metrics:


1. Search behavior.

We seek to understand what the user does on the results pages when searching. To measure the success of the experience, we will use three main metrics: the number of product impressions, the clicks on those products and the relationship between the two, which will give us the Click-Through Rate (CTR). In this way, we will know to what extent users go from the search results page to the product pages. To these three metrics we can add a fourth one to assess whether the results offered to the user are relevant or not: the search refinement. This metric will tell us how many times users have to search until they find what they are looking for.


2. Purchase intent.

The next step will be to measure the same behavior in the next phase of the experience, in a more transactional environment. At this point, we will be interested in measuring how users coming from a results page behave. We will measure key actions such as the number of products viewed, the add-to-cart ratio, checkout initiations and, finally, the conversion-to-sale ratio.


We must continuously track these KPIs, analyzing them as if they were a funnel.





This analysis can be carried out based on different variables. For example, we can segment the metrics according to the search word to see which terms perform better and which ones need an improved experience. Another option could be to analyze performance by product typology or categorization.





Strategy: Generate urgency


The strategy of generating urgency is based on applying psychological activation techniques such as FOMO (Fear-of-Missing-Out) during navigation so that the user perceives the need to buy at specific moments.


What kind of actions can we perform?


To generate urgency directly related to a specific product or service, we can display a last available units message. Another tactic we can use is to limit offers to a specific time.





Taking into account the inconvenience of waiting, we can apply tactics related to the shipment of products, for example, offering same-day delivery if the purchase is made before a certain time.





How do we measure the impact of this strategy?


In order to measure the performance of the tactics applied, we must take into account two main KPIs: the add to cart and the conversion of users who have been impacted by the urgency strategy we are applying.


In order to correctly analyze the results, we will have to establish an initial target increase of the metric we want to use, to know if the applied change has had a noticeable effect on that action.





How can we set this target increase?


There are different ways to achieve it, always based on data. From ROCKETROI, we recommend the following:

  1. Depending on the type of product on which we are applying the strategy. Analyzing the types of products or services we offer on our site, and understanding which ones can be more reactive to offers of this type (e.g. time a user takes to buy the product since accessing the site for the first time), can help us to set a more or less ambitious target.

  2. Analyze historical data. Study whether there have been similar products or services that we have sold in the past, and see how they have performed in the past. Additionally, if we have applied similar strategies previously, we can find out how these strategies affect our product or service.

  3. Review the overall annual objectives. Knowing where we want to go in the long term during the year can help us to narrow down the objectives we pursue with this type of strategy.



Once we have established the objective we want to achieve, and we have applied the strategy to our products, we must analyze the results obtained. To obtain relevant data on the results, we should do it in the following way:

  1. Observe whether we have managed to reach the target KPI.

  2. Extrapolate the values we have achieved to see the business impact.

This last point is the most critical. First of all, we must bear in mind that, if we manage to increase the percentage of add to cart, it does not imply that the conversion will increase by the same percentage. We must extrapolate this increase to understand how the overall conversion of the site has grown. To do this, we must do the following exercise:

  1. Analyze how many extra users we have managed to get to add the product to the cart.

  2. Add these extra users to the base of users who add to the cart without being impacted by the urgency.

  3. Apply the conversion percentage of the segment that has performed the add to cart action to the total number of users that have added to the cart.

  4. Calculate the impact of this segment on the total conversion.

Once this analysis has been carried out, we will obtain the incremental revenue or conversion that this particular action has meant for our site.



These are the two main strategies that we at ROCKETROI recommend you to apply on your site to achieve a significant impact on conversion during a key moment for your business. If you want to learn more about this topic, do not hesitate to contact us to take your business to the next level.

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