by Jim October 12, 2022

Welcome back everyone! My comments last week about a 3% conversion rate certainly stirred a reaction from some viewers. One person thought they were stuck at 3%, but when I had a look, it depended on which channel was being viewed. Through one it was a fantastic 27%! The lesson is to analyse each individual channel and see what is working. Understand the poor performers and improve those conversions.

What I learned

• Does 3% reflect all your channels?
• Understand your best performing channels.
• The importance of site search.
• Speed is half the battle.

Transcript

Hey. Welcome back, Rankers. Thought I’d do a show from the outside today. Hopefully, it’s not too blowy. It’s a beautiful day in Melbourne, as it happens, for a change. Last week’s show hit a cord with a few people and someone said to me, “Well, Jim, my ECR is actually only 3%. So how do I get it up?” And I went and had a look and I said, “Well actually, depending on where you look, because on desktop coming in from organic using the site search function, they’re going to convert at about 27%.” So we need to understand what’s going on there.

What are your channel conversions?

And all that’s going on there is that it’s easier for the shopper to navigate the site and obviously they’re getting the right traffic from organic because that’s where this huge conversion rate’s coming from. But what’s happening on mobile is what’s dragging the whole thing down. Even though his mobile’s performing better than what it was last year in some respects, in that the average order value has doubled. Now the reason the average order value has doubled is because he’s made the site faster. But what’s happened in the meantime is that it’s become harder to navigate for mobile users.

So you’ve got to split these channels up, you’ve got to split the devices up and you’ve got to understand what people are doing on the other end of that device. Like this device here that I’m using right now out here where I am, this is my driveway, incidentally. Out here, there is a lack of 4G. And you go anywhere outside the Melbourne metro area and you are going to have problems getting a reliable 4G signal. And when you go and have a look at your data and you have a look at where people are coming from around the country, you might start to understand how you can improve those conversions.

Remove the roadblocks

One of the ways that you can do that is by tweaking everything so it’s as fast as possible and as easy as possible to use, and that means being able to find things quicker. So it’s not just your page load time, it’s how you’ve got things laid out on the site. It’s the distractions that you might have put in place. It’s the things like we’ve talked about before, the shop windows that everyone tries to promote a sale on their homepage for some reason. I don’t know where that idea came from. Some designer thought it was a good idea to have a shop window to try to attract people into the site when they’re already there.

Anyway, if that’s your site, go in and have a look at your Google Analytics, go and drill down, have a look at the difference between mobile and desktop. Have a look at site search. Have a look at what each one of those are doing via the various channels that they’re coming into the site from. And you might be very, very surprised that it’s just one area of your site that’s dragging everything down. Certainly it is with this site I was looking at.

Hopefully that’s helpful. Please share, like and subscribe or follow me on LinkedIn. I am on Twitter, but it’s not really work-related. LinkedIn is where I’m doing all the work stuff and tell your friends. Thanks very much and see you next week. Bye-bye.

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.