3 Tips to Optimize Your Ecommerce Conversion Rate

We recently launched a Shopify website that saw only a 1% conversion rate within its first week of launch. This wasn’t much of an increase over the previous iteration and we had set a goal with the client to achieve a 3% conversion rate. Within 60 days of optimizing the website, we increased the conversion rate over 400% giving the website a 4.2% conversion rate, to be exact. The following 30 days, it continued to climb to 7%. For reference, the industry standard ecommerce conversion rate is roughly 2.35%. Learn how we optimized this website in order to increase the conversion rate by 700% within just 90 days post launch.

Monitor their website behavior

The first step to optimizing a website is having Google Analytics and other data tracking services setup properly. If you don’t have Google Analytics setup, follow this Google Analytics guide to get started. You’ll want to avoid making any knee jerk reactions to performance without properly monitoring and analyzing the data, which is easy to do when you see a slow day or unusual behavior. What you initially think is the reason that your site is not converting may not be the case. We make a lot of assumptions about how people will funnel into the experience until they complete a conversion, so the best place to get started is within the data.

The first place we look at is the behavior flow within Google Analytics. If your bounce rate is unusually high, and we mean anything over 40%, you’ll need to identify where the drop off happens. A bounce means the user left the same page they entered. If you have a high bounce rate, then it could be several issues: unqualified traffic, you’re not providing enough info, typo’s, bad design, bad user experience, slow load speed, or not having a proper mobile experience. But let’s assume for the sake of this article that your traffic is qualified, and it’s got a fresh hot design. The consumer has a problem, and your product is their answer to that problem. Looking at the behavior flow, where are users going as their second interaction? What are the pages they browse before making it to checkout? This could provide key insight into the customer’s decision making process before they’re ready to convert.

Heat Map Tracking

We also install HotJar heat mapping to monitor how far users scroll on each page, where they click, and where they spend the most time.

In our instance, we noticed the customer was looking for more information around the main ingredient in the product. While this product information was prominent throughout the website (it even had its own page linked in the main navigation bar), it wasn’t being reinforced towards the end of the conversion where users need reassurance and trust around their shopping decisions. We could see this from the high intensity of clicks within the navigation that drove to the ingredients page. Within that page, most users stopped scrolling after they felt comfortable about the safety and efficiency of the main ingredient.

We solved this issue by adding a highlighted ToolTip just above the product description within the product detail page. Now the site visitors could appease their concerns without leaving the product page and driving them away from converting.

Other pages we noticed users visiting prior to conversion were simply related to shipping & handling, FAQs, and return policies. Shipping and return policies are a concern for any buyer. Because our client’s products are also available on Amazon, we knew this variable would be a hurdle for conversion on their own ecommerce website. While we had that information on the product detail page (below product details), it just wasn’t prominent enough.

To solve this concern, we moved it just under pricing – which is where we know most people’s eyes lock-on immediately after arriving to the product page from an ad or organic listing. Amazon always features shipping info just below their pricing, so they must be onto something.

Identifying your customers within the brand experience

Another major issue we noticed was that consumers were not identifying themselves within the visuals of the website. Because our photography budget was limited to only stock, we were only able to be as inclusive as stock photography offers. The solve? We asked fans of the brand to send in their photos. This brought back the authenticity of the brand, gave us free content, and ultimately, helped increase our conversions.

The next area we looked at were keywords. Because we’re running both paid media and SEO campaigns, we’re tracking keywords data daily. From the paid media side, we looked at the keywords that drove the most conversions. This seems simple enough, but another area you’ll want to evaluate are the actual search queries, which can be found in the keyword section within your Google Ads campaign. You’re literally tapping into the consciousness of every user by seeing the question that lead to your ad – the answer to their question. We also leveraged those insights when creating our inbound content strategy for blog posts and social media.

On the organic side, using Ahrefs we could see which keywords were driving the most qualified traffic for conversions within the industry. We then took those keywords and gave them a boost by adjusting our focus H1’s, alt tags, and meta tags to incorporate more of this language. This resulted in several of our key pages to achieve page 1 search results, which constituted in an increase of the overall organic traffic by over 400% in three months.

As we learned from the behavior flow and heatmaps, users wanted more information about the product. Using the keyword research, we developed a content strategy that not only aided in organic growth, but also educating the consumers in the answers they were looking for.

By leveraging the data provided by Google Analytics, Google Ads, and HotJar our website conversions increased over 700% within 90 days. If you’ve tried all these tips and are still having conversion issues, then the other critical areas mentioned above are worth digging into further.

While having a mobile-friendly experience seems like a no brainer, there are still a lot of responsive websites that provide a less than stellar mobile experience. Because 70% of the site visitors were mobile, we saw this as an opportunity when redesigning the website. Site speed is also a major factor. Most people will exit the site if it takes more than a few seconds to load. There are several free tools available to test your site speed (and also identify the issues). Our two favorite tools are Webpage Test and Google’s PageSpeed Insights. As part of our quality assurance testing methods, we run these tests regularly to ensure websites are loading properly.

If you’ve tried other tactics that have helped increase your ecommerce conversion rate, let us know! We’d love to hear more about it.