Hi everyone, I'm Krista Seiden,
Analytics Advocate at Google, and in this Quick Tip
video today I'm going to give you some
ideas of what you might want to test if you
are an e-commerce website.
So with that let's go ahead and jump right in.
On your screens right now you
can see an example of an e-commerce website.
So this is the Google Merchandise Store.
This is where you can go to buy Google-branded gear online.
It's also what we use as our demo account for Google
Analytics. So you can actually see all of
the data for this account as well.
So here's our above-the-fold view, we have a
big high bar selling winter jackets and
as we scroll down the page you would see
that there's a lot of different boxes
advertising different products on the
Google Merchandise Store.
So let's go ahead and look at a few examples of what
we want to test on this store.
So first of all if you are an e-commerce site you
very likely have a checkout flow on your
website, and this is going to be a
crucial element for your site in order
to get people to actually go ahead and
buy your merchandise. So it's also going
to be a crucial area that you want to test.
Let's look at a few different ideas of
what you can test here. So first you can
simplify texts or bullets, or try to
remove a lot of extra text on that page
making it a very simple-looking sign-up flow.
You can change your checkout CTAs.
Perhaps it says Continue To Checkout,
or Buy Now, or something like that.
You could reduce the fields required,
you know, maybe you're asking for a whole lot
of information about their shipping,
and their email, and their phone number, and
all these things, and perhaps you don't
need all of that information to be able
to go ahead and sell them the product.
So you can try reducing those fields and see if
it increases your checkout rate
You could also reduce the number of
pages or steps that is required in your
checkout flow, and you can also try to
adding or removing a progress bar.
We've seen that a lot of times
progress bars tend to have a high impact
and flows like this if you let people know
how many steps they still have to complete.
So another example of the test is
discounts and targeting these based on
user behavior. So in this example here
I'm actually targeting a test to people
that we consider to be loyal customers.
So these are people who have purchased
from us in the past. That's how I've set up
the audience that I'm targeting this test to.
And when they land on our
website I want to give them a discount.
I want to say thanks for being a loyal customer.
Enjoy 20 percent off your
next purchase with this promo code.
That's a nice way to engage with your
users and thank them for their loyalty.
So finally I want to walk through
step-by-step one last test here that you
can try out if you are an e-commerce website,
and I'm calling this a Homepage
Apparel Content, or Apparel Takeover.
So the reason for this test is we want to
provide a personalized experience for
specific audience, and our hypothesis is that
we will increase revenue by showing
top-selling apparel products on the
homepage for those who have previously
shown a strong interest in the apparel
section of our website.
So we're going to show this test just on the homepage
of the Google Merchandise Store.
We're only going to have one variation.
We'll have the original plus our one variant,
and we're going to target this test to
users who have visited the apparel category
more than once before in prior visits.
Our goal in Google Analytics is
going to be revenue.
So we actually have a couple of data points that support
our hypothesis that we are pulling directly
from Google Analytics to support
building out this test, and they are that
apparel is actually the best-selling
category on the Google Merchandise Store,
and in that category t-shirts are actually
the best selling item within the apparel category.
So to give you an idea of what this might look like,
I have created a new version of the Google Merchandise Store.
So you can see on the left the red
boxes which I've replaced on the right
with some t-shirts and a hat, and this is
really getting at that data that
t-shirts are about selling and that
apparel overall is best-selling.
So we're going to go and see how that does.
A few other things that you can always look
for as an e-commerce site,
conversion funnel drop off. So you have probably a
couple different options for conversion funnels,
getting somebody to add a
product to their cart could be a funnel,
getting people to check out from cart
could be another funnel, and you're
going to want to analyze the different
steps in those funnels to see if there's
one area that people might be dropping
off more than others, and then try to
optimize that step.
Keywords, it's great to use Adwords Keyword data
to find really high converting keywords and then
use that as messaging on your landing pages.
So consistency between ads and website
generally helps to drive people to your conversions.
And finally, you can always
look at high page views but low
conversion rates and low page views but
high conversion rates to see if there's
something else you can do there to
optimize those pages.
So there you go, I've given you a few different examples
of what you might want to look at
and test if you're an e-commerce website.