New York, NY—March 20, 2024— Retailers have a key opportunity as they face soaring costs on ecommerce’s most critical acquisition channels, Meta and Google, which have driven up costs per visit by 12.4%–above average by 3%-according to Contentsquare’s new 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report. The report highlights influential data and actionable insights retailers can take to meet their customers where they are. Although retailers are hit the hardest, they also have a massive opportunity when considering traffic and revenue trends, especially on mobile, which has become the leading source for ecommerce traffic globally (77%) and accounting for 56% of revenues. With investments in digital customer experience, data shows retailers can experience massive gains in customer retention, conversion, and loyalty.   

“Consumers are strongly voicing their preferences, but data shows brands still have room to meet their expectations. How does that translate to business impact? What brands are losing by not improving customer experience is material, and business leaders need to ask themselves how they can capitalize on understanding customer preferences in order to deliver value,” said Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer, Contentsquare. “The data demonstrates a missed opportunity for brands on mobile. It’s clear that they need to evolve the way they think about mobile and optimize the entire mobile journey, not simply the pages or formatting, so it’s imperative to create more seamless experiences.”

Key Data and Takeaways for Brands:

• Despite the growth in mobile traffic share, conversion rates fell 5.8% as shoppers tend to make shorter, micro-visits while using mobile devices, and spend 60% less time per session viewing fewer pages than on desktop.
• Easy-to-remedy frustrations, including slow page loads and poor visitor responses, reduced revenue by $0.56 per visit.
  • Retailers can combat frustration by combining audience insights with proactive monitoring to consistently deliver experiences that delight their customers.
• “Growth at all costs” is outdated.
  • Instead of focusing simply on driving traffic, retailers need to shift their focus to improving the overall customer experience in order to drive profitability.  
• Conversions are 77% higher on desktop than on mobile
• Retail traffic is increasingly dependent on paid, as opposed to organic, sources, with paid driving 42.6% of visits and nearly half (47.8%) of all new visits to ecommerce sites.
  • Instead of chasing higher traffic volume, retailers’ best acquisition strategy may be a retention strategy. Knowing what constitutes an engaging, satisfying experience which encourages customers to stay, convert, and return is key.
• Apps provide a unique opportunity for retailers and they provide a critical role in delivering the returning customer experience, attracting nearly 4X the share of returning visitors compared with mobile web, according to Contentsquare’s 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report.
  • Although apps are typically positioned as a means to foster strong relationships with existing customers, brands were able to expand the breadth of their audience using apps last year – new visitors accounted for 15% of all app visits, up from 10% the prior year.

Download the full report here. 

# # #

Methodology

The Retail Digital Experience Benchmark is a set of aggregated and anonymized insights of digital performance. Strict aggregation measures are employed to ensure anonymity. These measures include requirements on analysis set size, diversity, and consistency, in order to present credible and reliable information that is insulated from concentration risk.

To qualify for inclusion in the year-over-year analysis, each site must have operated throughout the entire analysis period, in this case October 2022 through December 2023. Frustration analyses are calculated for October 2023. All year-over-year analyses are Q4 2023 / Q4 2022. All other analyses represent Q4 2023. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation.

This edition of the Retail Digital Experience Benchmark analyzed more than 25 billion sessions and 130 billion page views across 1,673 websites. 

About Contentsquare

Contentsquare delivers the power to make the digital world more human. Its AI-powered platform provides rich and contextual insight into customer behaviors, feelings and intent — at every touchpoint in their journey — enabling businesses to build empathy and create lasting impact. The global leader in digital experience analytics, Contentsquare helps brands everywhere transform the way they do business, allowing them to take action at enterprise scale and build customer trust with security, privacy, and accessibility. More than 1,000 leading brands use Contentsquare to grow their business, deliver more customer happiness and move with greater agility in a constantly changing world. Its insights power the customer experience on over 1 million websites worldwide. For more information, visit www.contentsquare.com

Media Contact:

Erica Ashner

Erica.Ashner@Contentsquare.com

The post Retail Sees Shift to Mobile Driving More than Half of Revenue and Nearly 80% of Traffic, According to New Report appeared first on Contentsquare.

We sit down with Jacqui Dent, Digital Optimisation Specialist at WhistleOut Australia to find out how her team leverages the power of digital experience analytics to derive insight from those clues to drive experimentation efforts and save time.

Hi, please introduce yourself.

My name is Jacqui Dent and I’m the Digital Optimisation Specialist at WhistleOut Australia. As part of the UX & Optimisation team at WhistleOut, my job is to find opportunities to increase conversion rates and the on-site experience for users. I use digital analytics, A/B testing and Contentsquare to understand how and why users interact with different parts of our site – or don’t in some cases!

What are some of your key digital challenges?

WhistleOut has been in the mobile and internet plan comparison space for 16 years and we have a huge audience for our tools and content. However, as a mature website, new audiences are harder to come by, so to continue growing our business, we need to focus on improving the experience for our users. We’ve built some comprehensive tools to help people compare mobile and internet plans. But comprehensive can also be complex. What we want to do now is hone in on what features really help our users, and help people find them as quickly and use them as easily as possible.

How does Contentsquare help to solve these challenges?

Before Contentsquare, we used analytics and other more conventional heat mapping tools to try to understand what was and wasn’t working for our users. But they either didn’t provide the level of granularity that we needed, or they weren’t technically advanced enough to work well with our site. Another problem was that these tools weren’t “always on”, which meant if we realised we needed information about a page, we would have to set up some monitoring and then wait several weeks or more for data to accumulate before we could do our analysis.

Now if we have a question about how users are interacting with a particular tool or page, we can get the information straight away and see not just what users are or are not clicking on but also information like how attractive it was to users, the time to first click, the exposure rate, and even the revenue generated to really build up a picture of what’s going on. We’ve discovered elements buried at the bottom of our pages that look like they’re actually way more interesting to users than we’d imagined. We’ve been able to gain a better understanding of what users seem to be looking for on each page, so we can help them find it more easily. We can direct our time and effort towards what works for our audience and avoid devoting time and resources towards what doesn’t.

We can also dig deeper into the results of A/B tests that we run on-site. Whereas before, with our A/B testing tool we’d be able to see whether one variant out-performed the other, we wouldn’t get much information about why. Now that we have Contentsquare, we can use Zoning Analysis on the test original and variant to see a detailed picture of user behaviour on each variant and identify where it’s different to figure out what’s driving the results we’re seeing.

Can you share some win(s) you’ve achieved with Contentsquare?

I think one of the biggest wins is just the level of information about our user behaviour that we now have access to – without having to do lots of digging into reports, setting up tracking, waiting and then making guesses based on the limited information that comes back. We’ve saved ourselves a tonne of time on data hunting, and we’ve avoided going down a few rabbit holes because we can now easily see what’s worth our time to pursue.

A big part of this has been our mobile and internet plans search tools. We’ve never had a heat-mapping tool sophisticated enough to work well with this before. These tools are rich in filters and functionality, but until recently we had very little data on how users were actually engaging with these. Contentsquare has very quickly given us solid numbers on what buttons and filters are being used the most and their impact on conversion rates. We’ve been able to use these insights to guide our A/B test plans. And after the tests are finished, of course, we can jump back into Contentsquare and analyse the results, to get more insight. All of this helps us to refine and iterate on the search tool design, which is pretty exciting.

Which teams at WhistleOut use Contentsquare?

Obviously, the primary users are my colleagues and me in the UX & Optimisation team. However, we also have Contentsquare users within the Marketing, Editorial and Product teams at WhistleOut. CS Live and Zoning Analysis are the most popular Contentsquare features outside the UX team. Team members use it to understand which parts of the pages they’re responsible for are driving clicks and engagement, as well as possibly under-utilised elements using the attractiveness rate. The teams use CS Live and Zoning Analysis to analyse organic SEO content, landing pages for our paid advertising, product pages and other areas of the site. It’s taken out a lot of the guesswork when understanding user behaviour.

What do you think is the biggest value Contentsquare offers?

I really love how it democratises UX data and analytics across the business. CS Live is a tool that absolutely anyone can learn to use, and accessing it is so quick and easy that anyone with the inclination can jump in and gain deeper insights into how our users are behaving on individual pages. So no one needs to rely on hunches or wait for the UX&O team to investigate and get back to them.

There’s also just so much information to dig into. If you want to deep dive into a problem or a question, you can do that. Or if you need a quick answer, it can do that too.

Finally, if you were to recommend Contentsquare to a peer, what would you say?

Now that I’ve used Contentsquare, I would feel blind without it. I think once you’ve mastered the basics of UX and Optimisation, it would be hard to get to the next level without a tool like this.

The post Learn how WhistleOut uses Contentsquare to understand user behaviour appeared first on Contentsquare.

New York, NY—February 14, 2024 —Digital ad spend is set to surpass $740 billion in 2024, yet website traffic, consumption and conversion were all down last year, according to the Contentsquare 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report. In fact, 55% of all sites saw lower traffic, 58% saw session consumption fall, and conversion decreased by 5.5% according to the report. Contentsquare, a global leader in digital experience analytics, also found that 40% of all online visits included avoidable friction, including technical website errors, slow page loads and rage clicks. 

“With a dip in global web traffic this year and the cost per visit rising almost 10%, making every visit count is business critical,” said Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer, Contentsquare. “We know from our previous consumer research that shoppers are leaving sites as a result of frustrations that could be easily resolved, such as slow page loads and rage clicks.”

While fixing frustration remains an utmost priority across industries, efforts to optimize mobile app performance are paying off, with apps recording steady customer engagement in 2023 (14 pages viewed per online visit up from 13.8 the previous year) and a conversion rate of 5.6% — 3x the conversion rate of mobile web traffic. Furthermore, app users spend 64% more time in-app than visitors spend on mobile sites.

Mobile, in particular, is the new competitive battlefield. We’ve seen gains in terms of engagement for apps this year, but mobile optimization as a whole is not as mature as it could be given the intelligence we have today on customer behaviors and preferences.

Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer, Contentsquare

Contentsquare’s latest Benchmark Report further revealed:

Mobile Visits Are Micro-Visits 

Despite mobile driving 70% of website traffic in Q4 2023, browsing time on mobile web is 60% shorter than on desktop. These “micro-visits” contribute to a decline in conversion rates, highlighting the gap between consumer expectations and current mobile web optimization practices.

A Shift to Paid Sources, With Search Driving 4x Conversion of Paid Social

Paid sources drove one-third of all traffic to websites this year, and 36% of new visits. For mobile web, paid sources account for 40% of traffic — twice as much as for desktop. While overall traffic is down, paid social is one of the few channels that saw traffic growth in 2023. However, social traffic struggles to convert compared to paid search, which still drives 4x the conversion rate of paid social. The report indicated that visits from social are less intentional, with a 41% higher bounce rate than paid search. Visitors from social may have inadvertently tapped through to a website because of a compelling story or influencer without the intention embodied by visitors coming from paid search.

The High Cost of Frustration

Frustrating visitors is a surefire way to waste visits. Sites that are slow to load (those taking more than three seconds) and perform poorly in responding to visitor interactions combine to reduce the engagement by 15%.

Rage clicks (clicking at least three times in less than two seconds) continue to frustrate visitors, and were found in 5.5% of all online visits. 

To learn more, download the full Benchmark report here.

# # #

Methodology

This edition of the Digital Experience Benchmark analyzed more than 43 billion sessions and 200 billion page views across 3,590 websites.

The 10 industries analyzed include: 

• Consumer Packaged goods
• Energy, Utilities, & Construction
• Financial Services
• Manufacturing
• Media
• Retail
• Services
• Software
• Travel & Hospitality
• Telecommunications

The Digital Experience Benchmark is a set of aggregated and anonymized insights into digital performance. Strict aggregation measures are employed to ensure anonymity. These measures include requirements on analysis set size, diversity, and consistency, to present credible and reliable information that is insulated from concentration risk. 

To qualify for inclusion in the year-over-year analysis, each site must have operated throughout the entire analysis period, in this case, October 2022 through December 2023. For current period analysis, the analysis period is Q4 2023. Additional hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation.

About Contentsquare

Contentsquare is a leading digital experience analytics platform that empowers businesses to understand and optimize the user experience across web, mobile, and app platforms. Its AI-powered platform provides rich and contextual insight into customer behaviors, feelings and intent — at every touchpoint in their journey — enabling businesses to build empathy and create lasting impact. More than 1,300 leading brands use Contentsquare to grow their business, deliver more customer happiness and move with greater agility in a constantly changing world. Its insights are used to optimize the experience on over 1.3 million websites worldwide. Founded in Paris and with offices around the world, Contentsquare is backed by leading high quality investors, including funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Bpifrance, Canaan, Eurazeo, Highland Europe, KKR, LionTree, Sixth Street and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. For more information, visit www.contentsquare.com.

Media Contact:

Contentsquare

Erica Ashner

erica.ashner@contentsquare.com 

The post Nearly Sixty Percent of Brands See Drop in Online Traffic and Consumption in 2023, According to New Report appeared first on Contentsquare.

Contentsquare recently surveyed over 600 US consumers about their online behaviors, attitudes and opinions when shopping during the holidays. The results shine a bright light on what matters most for consumers and what brands need to prioritize.

Below are the biggest pet peeves and digital experience frustrations, with UX tips to help you solve them.

1.Slow loading pages

Slow website loading time was the top pet peeve around online holiday shopping. The 2023 Digital Experience Benchmark found the same key learning—users are easily frustrated by slow-loading pages, causing them to bounce, abandon carts and never return.

However, this doesn’t have to be the case. To improve your site speed, consider minimizing characters (where appropriate) in your HTML, CSS and JS coding. For cookie banners, load them asynchronously so they don’t rely on the page rendering and ensure they’re responsive. As always, regularly monitor and optimize your Core Web Vitals metrics. (For more tips, see our guide, How to improve your website performance.)

2. Too many pop-ups

We’ve all experienced unwanted pop-ups. Whether it’s a CTA to subscribe to an email list, a discount announcement or any other type, they can negatively impact the user experience when done wrong. Many consumers are intent-led during holiday shopping, looking for specific items to purchase instead of casual browsing. Using pop-ups can slow down or completely stop their user journey, blocking them from completing their goal to purchase.

With this in mind, if you’re set on having a pop-up, ensure it’s quick loading and easy to exit out of or ignore. Use a high contrasting overlay to avoid confusion within the use journey. And again, ensure your site loads quickly to eliminate misclicks and unintentional redirects that can create confusion and frustration.

3. Item unavailability

There’s nothing more disappointing than finding an item you want and then learning it’s unavailable at checkout. Showing unavailable items or not properly marking low or out-of-stock items can quickly diminish consumer trust and trigger frustration.

On your product description pages (PDP) clearly tag items that are low stock or out of stock with bold and contrasting text. Clearly, indicating the number of that item in stock not only helps customers’ expectations but showing limited stock can trigger consumers into taking action faster than they normally would.

4. No quick-purchase checkout options

The payment experience is the last hurdle to conversion and arguably the most important—especially during busy seasons.

Offering a variety of quick one-click payment options like Shop Pay, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and more can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes a user to complete an order. Instead of entering all their personal information in form fills, the one-click pay option adds convenience and reduces their chances of abandonment and friction.

5. Negative mobile experience

More consumers shop on mobile devices than any other. If a site has a complicated user interface (UI) or a confusing user journey, visitors will quickly abandon it. Consumers shop while standing in line, waiting for the train, between meetings and any time throughout the day when they have a few minutes to spare. If your digital experience can’t match expectations at that moment, you may lose that user for good.

A mobile-first strategy is not a quick fix but a long-term strategic shift. Start by simplifying your mobile user journeys by streamlining things like the navigation bar and above-the-fold homepage displays. (See our guide, How to optimize mobile experiences to drive growth).

6. Poor search results

It’s frustrating not being able to find what you’re looking for. Visitors who use your search bar are often more intent-driven and are more likely to convert. So, creating a seamless and intuitive search experience can boost your conversions and revenue.

Within your search bar, use categorized autocomplete to help users quickly find the items they are looking for in the correct product category. Bold non-keywords to ensure clarity and prevent misdirection in the user journey. On the search results page, limit the number of results per page to prevent confusion while keeping the search window visible at all times.

7. Promotion codes that don’t work

Broken promotion codes and unclear promo requirements quickly lead to frustration. It can often deter users from making a purchase at all.

To ensure a seamless experience with promotions and discount codes, clearly and concisely describe the parameters. However, it’s important not to overload the visitor with too much information at the beginning of their journey because it can cause confusion. Additionally, automate the application of a discount or promo code when connected to a specific item or cart value to reduce checkout steps.

The post 7 holiday shopping frustrations and how to fix them appeared first on Contentsquare.

To design user experiences that actually convert in the age of distraction, Scott Shillinglaw, Senior Digital Product Manager at Koala, lives by three words – less is more. 

At CX Circle Sydney, Scott reflects on how embracing simplicity helped the team improve engagement and conversion metrics. He also talked about removing a feature they thought would help, but didn’t. 

Scott shares his three essential tips on designing user experiences that can help convert even the most distracted users. 

1. Too much information might be hindering conversion

When we design user experiences, we often add more features and information, thinking that we’re helping our users by providing them everything they need to guide them to checkout. 

After all, more must be better, right? 

However, this sometimes unintentionally creates complexity in the user journey. Too much information can lead to cognitive overload, distracting people from taking the next step toward purchase. 

How Koala’s delivery tracker widget looked like before checkout

The problem was, Koala’s delivery checker was solving a problem for the business. Customers had logistics-related questions, and having delivery details shown upfront saved Koala’s customer service team time handling these inquiries. 

Consulting Contentsquare, Scott and his team found people spent an average of 43 seconds on Koala’s website across all page groups — not enough time to sell a visitor on a high-end furniture product emotionally. Having more information could hamper the decision-making process. 

The Koala product team A/B tested moving the delivery checker widget later in the funnel, and found that this improved add-to-cart, conversion rates, and checkout stats: 

Information overload is real, and removing distractions for your visitors can give them a better experience.

2. Test your assumptions 

Conventional e-commerce wisdom says cross-selling helps to increase your average order value (AOV). 

It’s worked for businesses like Costco and B&Q.

But unlike Costco, Koala’s luxury furniture wasn’t the type (most) people bought on a whim. An average basket size of $1000 meant slower purchase decisions over a few days. 

If you’re spending a thousand dollars, a few hundred more on a recommended item isn’t chump change. Therefore, was a cross-sell widget a good fit for Koala’s UX and selection of high-end products? 

The team used A/B testing and Contentsquare’s Zoning Analysis’s click metrics to validate their assumptions. In the Japan market, they focused on only cross-selling super-relevant and discounted products, improving year-on-year cross-sell rates by 16-20% 

Once again, applying the less is more principle helped Koala improve add-to-cart rates and order completions, bringing in over AUD 350k incremental revenue per quarter.  

3. You can’t learn if you don’t fail 

When to comes to experimentation, it’s better to fail a few times than to always succeed. To walk the talk, Scott’s team removed a feature that they thought would be helpful but wasn’t. 

At Koala, visitors usually have a multi-session purchase journey. After seeing a product on the Koala website for the first time, they’ll take a few days to research product reviews and competing products.

Consulting Contentsquare, Scott and his team saw apparent differences in how people browsed the website depending on where they were on their decision journey. 

The team hypothesized shorter buying processes would help conversions. They developed a ‘favorites’ feature for customers to save products they were interested in, making it easier for customers to continue the buying journey. 

But after deployment, they realised that people weren’t using the feature as much as they thought. There was in fact, minimal impact on add-to-cart, order completion, or revenue metrics, which led the team to removing the feature. 

The learning? Even though you thought something was going to be useful for users, always listen to the data and always put your users first. 

3 user experience tips from Scott on designing for simplicity in a chaotic digital world 

1. More information doesn’t always work for people with short attention spans: Too much information at the wrong stage of the customer journey can be detrimental to UX and business metrics. Ask yourself if the information is necessary, and always A/B test to validate your assumptions. 
2. Review and test your assumptions at least once a month. Questioning if conventional e-commerce best practices applied to Koala uncovered hidden opportunities for improvement. 
3. Embrace failure and be ready to kill your darlings:  Sometimes things just don’t work as expected, and that’s okay! Either iterate or prepare to kill the feature if people don’t find it helpful or if there’s no significant impact on your usage metrics. 

If you couldn’t attend CX Circle Sydney, don’t worry because we’ve got you covered. You can catch all sessions on demand here. 

The post How Koala adopts simplicity in their UX and product design appeared first on Contentsquare.

This article will guide you through what you can do before, during and after the season. Let’s go for it!

Preparing for eCommerce peak season: get your site ready for the ride

In the dynamic realm of e-commerce, preparation is the key to thriving during peak shopping seasons like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas. Digital leaders know that thorough advance planning is essential for not only surviving but excelling during these periods of heightened online activity. How can we make sure that our site is ready for the peak season?

Step 1: Make sure that your website is optimized for the best customer experience

The initial and pivotal step entails a comprehensive evaluation and optimization of your existing digital channels well in advance of the peak season frenzy. By drawing insights from prior experiences and harnessing data from your Digital Experience Analytics platform, you can make informed decisions regarding the refinement of your online presence. 

Data-supported insights guide adjustments to layouts and the positioning of content, ensuring that your digital storefront is finely tuned to maximize customer engagement. 

• Understand how you compare to industry peers and how seasonality works by accessing industry benchmark data (see CS Benchmarks)
• Optimize product performance by accessing real time insights of your eCommerce (see CS Retail Media)
• Deliver the best customer experience thanks to a 360º customer understanding (see our platform)

Take all those insights and prepare your site for the peak season accordingly. 

Step 2: Follow the user journey, from campaigns to conversion

Not everything happens purely in-site. Probably you are running some advertising campaigns, maybe even several at the same time, each driving traffic to your site and consuming your budget. It wouldn’t be wise to lose sight of how all that inbound traffic behaves on your site.

Establishing seamless connections across your digital ecosystem is imperative. If you are getting ready to perform at your best, you won’t have time to consolidate data/information across different platforms. 

For that, make sure you integrate your Google or Adobe Analytics campaigns with your Digital Experience Analytics platform to create a comprehensive monitoring framework. This integration equips you with the ability to track and comprehend the performance of your marketing campaigns, thereby enabling the development of a digital experience that optimally directs traffic and enhances conversion rates.

Beyond marketing campaigns, as a general rule, integrate as much customer information as you can. VoC, APM solutions, Web Analytics, A/B Testing… all of them could work together and enhance and supercharge your marketing tech stack.

This is crucial not only for your ability to respond in the short-term, but also for future analysis and to lead you to better and more efficient campaigns. 

Step 3: Embrace Real-Time analysis and automation

During peak seasons, data flows incessantly. Relying solely on manual responses is insufficient. Automation becomes your ally in efficiently managing the inundation of information. Implement integrations that automate routine tasks and decisions will enable seamless operation when the crucial moment arrives.

The capacity to analyze data in real time is equally indispensable. Leveraging machine learning and AI-driven insights empowers you to make instantaneous, data-supported decisions. This enables the identification of trends, prediction of customer behavior, and proactive responses. Such real-time adaptability can determine whether you capitalize on surges in demand or miss out on valuable opportunities.

How can you do this? At Contentsquare we approach this scenario providing real-time capabilities throughout our platform:

• Advanced AI that helps you understand customer experience in real-time. Metrics such as Frustration Score can make sense of diverse information (Rage clicks, load times, hesitation, …) to understand when customers are struggling in real time.  
• Real-time alerts and dashboards, to keep control on your most important KPIs and triggering alerts that let you know about the urgent issues to solve
• Reporting and communication tools. Get the right alert to the right team using the right channels. Whether it is a Jira Ticket or a Slack message

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Navigating Peak Season Challenges: what to do during the holiday season

As the peak shopping season unfolds, the moment of truth arrives for digital leaders and their teams. It’s a time where every action counts, where real-time understanding and fast reactions are key. The consequences of any delay can be steep, with missed opportunities and potential revenue losses looming on the horizon. What to do when you have to perform at your best?

Prioritize Customer Experience above all

Set the right north star for your team. Peak season is the time to put customer experience front and center. Your response plan should revolve around ensuring that every customer enjoys a smooth journey. For instance, while Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions may highlight various issues, it’s crucial to prioritize those that have the most significant impact on customer experience and conversion rates. 

Your response plan should align with the North Star of delighting customers.

Context Matters: Enhancing Operational Efficiency

In the heat of peak season, providing context to every support issue is non-negotiable. Context not only expedites troubleshooting but also enhances operational efficiency. The ability to pinpoint the root cause of an issue swiftly can mean the difference between a minor hiccup and a major disruption.

Now it’s the time when all your integration efforts pay off. 

If your team needs to solve several backend problems, wouldn’t it be ideal if they could prioritize based on what is preventing customers from converting? Which errors are impeding customers to go further? Having that information integrated with your APM events gives you priceless speed to resolution. 

When a customer escalates a problem to customer service, what if the agent could have access to a Session Replay that shows exactly what the customer experienced? That would save a lot of time and frustration in solving the problem. 

10 lessons learned from past peak seasons with Clarins 

The AI Advantage: Streamlining Complex Challenges

Utilize real-time dashboards to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) that track customer experience and essential metrics related to business and technical performance. 

AI-driven insights play a pivotal role in simplifying the interpretation of vast data volumes in real time. They offer the capability to monitor and receive alerts promptly. This capability can be a game-changer, allowing rapid responses to minimize customer disruptions when issues arise and identifying opportunities for improvement. In essence, these dashboards and AI insights serve as your eyes and ears in the digital landscape, empowering you to act swiftly and enhance customer satisfaction while optimizing your operations.

Not only can you reduce your customer’s pain when something goes wrong but also to detect opportunities to even do better. 

Learning from the  experience: the 2024 peak season will be here before we know it will be here before we know it

Once the peak season ends, it’s essential to conduct a thorough post-mortem analysis and gain valuable insights from the experience. The goal isn’t to achieve a flawless peak season – that’s an elusive target. Customer preferences, evolving trends, and social dynamics ensure that each peak season is unique. 

As a digital leader, your primary aspiration should be to embrace agile learning from these trends, react swiftly, and consistently deliver the best customer experience. Data holds the key to navigating the evolving landscape of peak seasons. It’s not just about mining vast amounts of data; it’s about using data to gain foresight into the shape of your next peak season. Data-informed decisions are your compass. And customer experience should be your north star. 

After all, you crafted that digital experience with your customers in mind, didn’t you?

• Merely having a high-performance e-commerce platform is insufficient if your customers can’t find what they want and can’t do what they want.
• Collecting demographic data about your traffic is valuable, but it’s crucial to connect this information to customer behaviors that have the most significant impact on your business (all the nuances that make traffic convert into sales).
• Paying attention to those who silently exit without complaints is equally essential. Direct customer feedback is invaluable, but you also need to delve deeper into their behavior—the digital equivalent of non-verbal communication. 

Digital Experience Analytics provides the ideal framework for understanding your customer experience comprehensively. It encompasses critical aspects such as site performance, product placement, and the customer journeys that yield the highest conversions. Not only that, it helps you orchestrate all your ecommerce performance data (APMs, VoCs, Traffic Analytics, etc) and make sense of your customer experience as the north star. With this robust toolset, you can dissect and understand your customers’ digital journey and ensure that every aspect of your digital presence aligns seamlessly with their needs and expectations.

How can Contentsquare help you during your peak seasons?

Contentsquare provides you the leading Digital Experience Analytics platform that help retailers excel in customer experience and keep your peak seasons under control:

• Best-in-class. Compare your performance against industry peers, so you can stand out 
• Customer centricity. Understand your customer behavior in an impact-first approach, both in your web and app
• Fast response. Access real-time information and alerts
• Excellent performance. Excel in your digital experience performance by leveraging on a first class Digital Experience Monitoring platform 

Ready for more? Ask for a demo. 

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The post Ecommerce peak season: How to Optimize Your Website for a Smooth Shopping Experience appeared first on Contentsquare.

This article seeks to answer all these questions and looks at practical examples from the recent CX Circle talk given by Katie Hardisty Smith, Head of eCommerce at LOOKFANTASTIC.

What is phygital customer experience? (And why should you care?)

Today’s forward-thinking brands seek stronger connections with their customers. They’re looking for more loyalty, deeper engagement, and an increased customer lifetime value (CLV) based on trust and long-term relationships. For many, the phygital customer experience is the answer.

If you hadn’t sussed it out yet, Phygital is a portmanteau word combining (phy)sical and dig(ital). It describes the process of using technology to link the customer experience in the physical and digital spaces. For traditional brands, this means taking the best of the in store experience and replicating that personal service online. For digital-first brands, it means finding ways to expand the digital experience into the physical and add elements of the classic in store experience for customers.

Discover the new era of digital experience

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Phygital also means unifying the customer experience across digital and physical channels. There must be synergy. Or, as Katie Hardisty Smith put it in her talk: “Brands need to establish the same aesthetic and identity both digitally and physically to create a circular approach that people want to engage with.”

Brands can do this in different ways. It might be as simple as allowing easy online ordering for in-store pick up. It could mean installing tablets or other digital devices in physical stores where customers can search for specific stock or place orders. Or it could involve creating real-world events that customers can attend in person or stream online.

Smartphones are embedded into our daily lives, taking up around 40% of our waking hours, on average. Phygital is the natural response to this. Customers want to be able to access their favourite brands at any given time via any channel. In that sense, the phygital experience is also the natural next step from the concept of the omnichannel customer experience.

The benefits of phygital customer experience

There are many potential benefits for brands that create compelling phygital experiences.

Loyalty and retention

The first is to increase customer loyalty and retention. Brands that can provide seamless experiences across channels will stand out to customers. By contrast, those that can’t will frustrate and irritate customers, driving them away.

Consider a brand which offers a quick and easy store locator and gives you a choice of locations for picking up online orders. Or a clothing store that allows you to order online and then offers to pick up any returns from your door.

Offering consistency and personalised service across channels is table stakes in today’s competitive eCommerce environment. Get it right, and customers will keep on returning.

Brand awareness

Another key benefit of Phygital is increased brand awareness. Setting up an engaging pop-up stall in a buzzing shopping mall can drive traffic to a brand’s website to take advantage of exclusive offers, for example.

Curating and serving the right content to customers via social media, messaging apps and email can generate a huge amount of buzz around a brand, especially if those messages are tied in with physical events like the in-store launch of a new product that digital subscribers get notified about in advance.

Competitive advantage

Creating phygital experiences can help you stand out from your competitors. In her talk, Katie Hardisty Smith mentioned an example of a poor phygital experience. In her case, a clothing store had persuaded her to buy multiple items at once thanks to personalised messaging, tailored web pages and tailored offers. Sadly, she had to return some items. To do so involved visiting a physical store where the service was terrible.

This created a disconnect between the online and physical environments, which is deadly to providing a true, phygital experience. Most brands still don’t do this well. As a result, those that do really stand out in the minds of customers. In her talk, Katie went on to mention the superb click-and-collect service provided by one of the UK’s biggest grocery stores, ASDA. Free advertising to a room of marketing professionals—all from a single positive phygital experience.

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Increased conversions and sales

While there are many more potential benefits to getting this right, the main one is of course the boost brands receive in sales and conversions.

Offering a great omnichannel experience across phytigal and digital, leads to driving more footfall to stores from online traffic, and more online traffic from store visitors. It means building a real bond with customers which makes your brand top of mind for them. And it means they’ll prefer to buy from you over others in your space.

Examples of phygital customer experiences

It’s all well and good talking about what phygital is and its potential benefits. You likely want some ideas about how to incorporate this with your brand. This is where Katie Hardisty Smith’s recent CX Circle talk proved very useful, as she went through several examples of where her online beauty brand LOOKFANTASTIC. had applied the concept successfully.

This is especially interesting since LOOKFANTASTIC. is a digital-only brand which operates without any physical stores. How can a brand without a permanent physical presence get phygital?

Pretty easily, it turns out, with a little strategic thinking and the help of some clever technology.

Example 1: Live shopping at Coachella

The first example she gave was of a LOOKFANTASTIC trip to the Coachella Valley arts and music festival in California. The company took a couple of beauty influencers on the journey and brought the whole experience to life for their customers via their social media channels.

They hosted Q&As with their influencers. They streamed live shopping on TikTok. In short, they digitised the physical experience, recreating it for the thousands of customers who would never get the chance to visit Coachella.

To boost brand awareness, they set up their own pop-up stand in the Arndale Shopping Centre in Manchester and the Battersea development in London.

“This allowed us to interact with our customers, build our brand, give experiences new life and meaning digitally—so we could then drive a sustained experience,” Katie said.

Example 2: Foundation finder

One really impactful phygital experience involved the introduction of the Foundation Finder tool to their website, which Katie described as “a game changer”.

“Traditionally, finding the right foundation for you has been a visit to one of the numerous beauty counters within a large department store where we put our faith in a makeup artist already wearing too much foundation herself to actually find the right match in those lights,” she said.

The Foundation Finder asks a series of questions, for example about the customers’ skin tones and preferred coverage, with a database of 3,500 swatches from multiple brands. This helps the user to find their shade in the foundation of their choice based on what they currently use.

The secret to great phygital experiences

“Whether you’re a working mom that needs a fast alternative foundation or you’re a Tik Tok-obsessed beauty lover that wants that full community experience, we have got something for you and we are there with you whenever you need us,” Katie concluded.

This is the secret of success when it comes to creating your own phygital experiences. Focus on your customer needs and—with the help of the right technology, strategic thinking and some experimentation—you’ll be able to come up with experiences that your customers will love too.

The post Why “phygital” is the future of customer experience appeared first on Contentsquare.

The company attracts tens of thousands of customers daily, and any opportunity to improve customer experience is a potential revenue generator. Investing in digital experience analytics is helping them reduce customer friction and better understand their customers. 

Speaking at CX Circle Melbourne, Kelly Truong, MyDeal’s Experience Design Lead, shared how Contentsquare helps MyDeal’s UX team track non-interactions, proactively spot frustration and make data-driven decisions.

Here are three tips from MyDeal to help you optimize your customer journey. 

#1. Observe non-interactions to get a complete picture of customer behavior 

Experience metrics like hesitation time, attractiveness rate, and scroll rate hold clues to why your customers behave the way they do and how you can improve their digital experience to drive conversions. 

However, traditional web analytics platforms don’t track these non-interactions. You’ll need to do some serious guesswork based on your existing data or set up specific event tags to collect the data. 

Both options aren’t ideal in the long run. Here’s how MyDeal navigated this sticky situation. 

Challenge 

Data tracking was a pain for Kelly’s team before Contentsquare. Their existing tools couldn’t collect data retroactively, so they had to know the goals and digital components they wanted to monitor beforehand. 

As a result, they didn’t have any data on questions they didn’t expect—relying on assumptions, industry best practices, and gut feel to fill the gaps. 

In Kelly’s eyes, this was not proactive or effecient, so they turned to Contentsquare to get the answers they needed. 

Action: 

On Contentsquare, Kelly’s team first created workspaces for each of their key pages to monitor performance across pages and zones. The team also made custom alerts to detect performance anomalies. 

What’s more, Contentsquare’s tagless implementation meant Kelly no longer needed to painstakingly pre-plan event tags to get data. Contentsquare automatically captures every click, scroll, hover, and swipe, helping Kelly’s team answer questions they weren’t expecting with confidence. 

Results: 

Kelly and her team can now track the non-interactions they need to analyze what visitors found engaging, helpful, or frustrating. Together with Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis and Session Replay features, she has a 360-degree view of how customers use their digital platforms. 

The new experience metrics Kelly can access to measure customer behavior with Contentsquare

These insights unlocked a more flexible and efficient way for her team to work. At a glance, Kelly knows what’s working and needs improvement, helping her team address issues more proactively. It’s also easier for Kelly’s team to choose specific segments or journeys to optimize further, allowing the UX team to be more proactive and less reactive. 

#2. Don’t wait for users to complain

Every minute customers spend having a frustrating experience on your website can be thousands of dollars in revenue lost. And according to our 2023 Digital Experience Benchmark Report, more than one in three website visits cause frustration, affecting engagement and conversion. 

Thus, spotting and solving any frustration quickly is vital, especially on your product, category, and checkout pages. Here’s how Kelly’s team used Contentsquare to spot frustrations and devise a solution to avoid revenue loss.

Challenge: 

Using Contentsquare’s Zone Based Heat Mapping, team noticed that customers were clicking up to five times more frequently on a credit card form field at checkout.

The troubling signs didn’t stop there. The team found that customers clicked on the Confirm and Pay button twice as often—indicating frustration and a high risk of losing customers before conversion. 

Action: 

When Kelly and her team find a potential issue, they use the WWWWWA acronym to break it down and analyze it constructively:

• Who experiences it? 
• What is the purpose? 
• Where is it visible? 
• Why is it there? 
• Are there any dependencies? 

With this method, they can interpret an issue in the proper context, understand the customer’s perspective, and account for any dependencies before making a recommendation. 

How my deal’s UX team analyzed an issue using the WWWWWWA problem-solving method

Results: 

Kelly’s team shared insight on customer behavior and device information to help their analysts and developers quickly determine how to fix the error. Conversion rates went up by 2% while reducing fix times. 

#3. Transcend guesswork and gut feeling with data 

Picture this: you’ve had a great sales week. 

But what made it successful? Was it the quality of your sales offer? Or did a web banner or a button perform exceptionally well? Countless factors can influence your conversions and sales, making identifying the exact reason challenging. 

But, with the right insights, you can make your website work harder and improve sales. Or, in Kelly’s case, triple a homepage carousel’s return on investment (ROI). 

Let’s find out how the team got there. 

Challenge: 

Before Contentsquare, Kelly and her team couldn’t tell which parts of their website were driving sales, preventing them from making informed recommendations to the marketing and merchandising teams to improve engagement. 

The team spotted an opportunity for improvement with Contentsquare. Even though their home page was their fourth most visited page on mobile devices, most people spent only 27 seconds on it and barely scrolled. 

MyDeal’s initial homepage engagement metrics on mobile

Action: 

Using Zoning Analysis, they compared homepage engagement over the peak Christmas and Boxing Day sales season with the post-Christmas and Back to School season, looking at metrics like tap rate, exposure rate, attractiveness, and revenue generated.

The four metrics MyDeal used to compare homepage engagement on mobile devices.

Kelly’s team found their Categories carousel and Product Recommenders at the end of the home page had significantly higher engagement and attractiveness than the carousel at the start of the page. They hypothesized that labeled carousels show more products and break up the content on mobile, encouraging deeper browsing. 

Difference in carousel engagement rates from the beginning of the homepage (1.68%) to the end of the homepage (4.38%)

Results: 

This simple change helped them see a massive improvement in their Trending Categories homepage carousel, generating 336% more revenue and doubling click rates on a page view and session level. 

Engagement metrics and ROI before and after the change in carousel

3 key takeaways to optimize your customer journey: 

Be proactive, not reactive: Online user experiences matter and affect customer conversion and retention. Keep an eye on critical conversion points like checkout pages for any signs of user frustration to avoid losing revenue opportunities.

Make decisions on actual data: Many factors influence conversions and sales. With the correct data to pinpoint what made a campaign successful, you can replicate its success or find opportunities to improve. 

Don’t be afraid to ask why:  Spotted a potential issue? Be sure to analyze the context, understand the views of different teams, and any limitations before you make a recommendation. Structured inquiry methods like WWWWWWA help organize your thoughts.

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The post How MyDeal uses Contentsquare to optimize customer journeys appeared first on Contentsquare.

The company’s collaborative approach has paid off. Thanks in part to its close relationship with other departments, as well as a rigorous testing culture and regular customer contact, Ecosa’s UX team has run a host of tests and experiments that have improved conversion rates.

Speaking at CX Circle Melbourne, Ecosa’s Lead Product/UX Designer Michelle Eynon, shared how Contentsquare’s insights have helped test and validate her team’s UX experiments while drawing on customer insights to create a seamless digital customer experience. 

Here are four strategies Ecosta has used that you can follow to emulate their success.

#1. Test, test—and test again

Social proof and intuitive navigation are two things customers look out for when buying a product from your company. 

But what’s the most effective way to bring them together in your UX designs? 

You might have assumptions about that, but they will need to be validated. And that’s  where testing proves invaluable. 

Hypothesis 

According to Ecosa’s customer research, customer reviews and star ratings help customers decide on purchases. 

The team hypothesized that making product reviews more visible would positively affect customer engagement.

Ecosa’s new product tile

Test

Ecosa’s UX team created a new tile for product pages that summarizes product reviews and highlighted star ratings so customers could see them at a glance. 

To see if visitors would interact with this new tile, the team A/B tested two versions of it on Contentsquare, tracking attractiveness and exposure rates.

Results

After applying Contentsquare’s Zone Based Heat Maps to the A/B test results, it was obvious which tile was the winner. 

Customers interacted more with the new tile when it showcased product reviews and star ratings and were more likely to scroll down to read the information on it. This meant its attractiveness rose from 1.99% to 5.02%.

What’s more, with product reviews and star ratings featured on the tile,  conversion rates via rose by 7% 

#2. Stay close to your customers

Understanding your customers’ needs presents you with opportunities to help them make informed decisions. 

Here’s how Ecosa combined customer journey data from Contentsquare with research to improve conversion rates. 

Challenge and hypothesis 

Ecosa’s customer research showed that their customers would research and compare several brands before purchasing. 

Michelle’s team hypothesized that providing customers with a comparative tool on their product pages would help drive conversions.  

Action 

To help customers with their research, Ecosa created a competitive analysis section on the Ecosa Pillow product page, making sure to include key selling points of their pillow products that aren’t supplied by their competitors’ pillow products.

Following positive results on new customer conversion rates as a result of this change, the team continued to optimize. 

After seeing high click-through rates on the competitor subhead, Ecosa’s UX team tested a second pillow page variant, further elaborating on how its pillows stand out from the competition, and calling out its trial period return policy.

Results 

Using Contentsquare, the UX team found that having a competitor comparison on the pillow product page improved new customer conversions by an amazing 28%. 

Both tests resulted in an 18% increase in conversion rate.

#3. Speak to customer-facing teams 

Conducting customer interviews and consulting behavioral data aren’t the only ways to uncover customer pain points. 

You should also prioritize speaking to your customer-facing teams, such as customer service, product and procurement. 

Here’s how an insight from customer service helped Michelle’s team improve conversions by 8%—making their customer service team happier in the process. 

Challenge and hypothesis 

Ecosa’s customer service team brought it to Michelle’s team’s attention that 3.9% of pre-purchase calls to customer service were querying available sizes of the  Ecosa mattress.. 

Upon inspection, the UX team realized that this sizing information needed to be clarified on the website.

Action 

Ecosa’s UX team put together a quick, and highly effective, initial solution – inserting mattress specifications (including sizes) on the website for customers to read. 

This quick fix halved the number of pre-purchase calls concerning mattress sizing from 3.9% to 2.1%.

Later, the team created a new information drop-down area (including mattress measurements) as part of a new product page design. 

This made that essential information easier to find, further reducing pre-purchase calls concerning mattress sizing to 1.32% .

Results 

With product information now easy for customers to locate, pre-purchase calls to customer service dropped by 300%—and conversions rose by 8%. 

#4. Use behavioral data to learn how customers interact with your site

Understanding how your visitors behave on your website is the first step towards deciphering what frustrates them and how they interact with a site to get what they want. And it’s this understanding that informs how Ecosa’s UX team designs the company’s digital experience for its customers. 

Challenge and hypothesis 

Customers have low attention spans. They tend to scan, rather than read, your online content. And according to our recent Digital Experience Benchmark report, they only scroll an average of 50% down pages.

It’s essential to make it easy for customers to find the most critical information about the product they’re looking at, ideally without having to scroll. 

You might, for example, cater to this behavior by adding a product summary or other eye-catching information at the top of a product  page. 

That’s exactly what Michelle’s team decided to do, and test.  

Action 

Ecosa’s UX team worked with its product and procurement teams to create a ‘Best For’ section at the top of each product page, highlighting the key selling points of each product. 

The team ran an A/B test with Contentsquare to validate their new version, comparing conversions, exposure and attractiveness metrics. 

Results 

When product pages included the product summary up top, they performed significantly better. 

Actually, that’s an understatement: They saw 16% conversion rate boost and 173% increase in engagement.

3 key takeaways for creating a better digital experience 

Keep things simple: Not all changes need to be huge. Simple solutions can reap huge rewards without having to take up a lot of time and/or resources. 

Stay close to your customers:  Regular customer research helps you understand what they’re looking for and will help you develop content that helps them along the purchase journey. 

Go beyond data:  Customer-facing teams can provide valuable insights on enhancing user experience that may not be evident through data analysis.

Want to see how Contentsquare can help you understand how to optimize your digital experience? Watch the 6 minute demo below. Then drop us a line.

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The post 4 actionable ways Ecosa uses Contentsquare to improve the customer experience appeared first on Contentsquare.

For starters, it helps explain the -3.5% Year-on-Year drop in eCommerce conversion rates that we saw last year—and the accompanying dip in session consumption metrics such as time spent per session.

We lay out exactly how much these metrics dropped across seven retail sub-industries in 2022 in our recent 2023 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark report, which we link to below. (You can also read a summary of the report’s key findings.)

To accompany the report’s release, we’re lending retailers a hand in addressing its diagnosis of conversion rate decline by publishing a series of articles on eCommerce conversion rate optimization. (This in-depth, albeit more general, article on conversion rate optimization should also help.)

In this article, we draw on findings from the benchmark report to investigate why the eCommerce conversion funnel is changing—and why this change demands a new approach to conversion rate optimization for retailers. 

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What is the eCommerce conversion funnel?

Marketers use funnels to represent the customer journey from ‘top of the funnel’ (TOFU) awareness through ‘middle of the funnel’ (MOFU) consideration to ‘bottom of the funnel’ (BOFU) conversion. The object is to get as many customers from the top to the bottom of the funnel. 

A narrowing funnel shape is appropriate because while awareness casts a wide net and (ideally) brings in a big audience, only a minority of those who become aware of a brand will end up buying something from it, and there’s a steady drop-off along the way. 

Traditionally, the on-site eCommerce funnel has been mapped out like this:

• Top of the funnel (TOFU): Awareness = Homepage
• Middle of the funnel (MOFU): Consideration = Category/Search/Product pages
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): Intent/Purchase = Checkout

With this model in mind, retailers have spent much time curating stories and working on TOFU (homepage-based) content to raise brand awareness, attracting new customers who can be nurtured further down the funnel towards conversion and retention.

But things have changed. For an increasing proportion of visitors to eCommerce websites, the homepage is no longer the first port of call—and they’re entirely bypassing the traditional TOFU.

So why is this happening?

eCommerce conversion funnel: the differents stages

In the world of eCommerce, the conversion funnel is a critical component for businesses looking to increase their sales and revenue. It is a marketing concept that describes the journey a customer takes from the initial introduction to a product or service to the final purchase. Understanding the different stages of the conversion funnel is essential for eCommerce businesses to optimize their sales funnel and convert more visitors into customers.

The eCommerce conversion funnel consists of four main stages:

1. Awareness: This is the top of the funnel where potential customers first become aware of a product or service. It includes various marketing channels, such as social media, search engines, and email marketing.
2. Interest: At this stage, customers explore and research products and services to learn more about their features, benefits, and pricing. This stage includes product pages and category pages on the eCommerce website.
3. Decision: In this stage, customers make a decision to buy a product or service. This stage includes the shopping cart and checkout process on the website.
4. Action: At the bottom of the funnel, customers complete the transaction and become paying customers.

By analyzing each stage of the eCommerce conversion funnel, businesses can identify areas where they can optimize their marketing efforts or improve the user experience on their website. This can help improve conversion rates and generate more revenue for the business.

ECommerce conversion funnel depending on industries

Why ecommerce conversion funnel can change depending on industry? Cause each industry is different and has different needs and goals. For example, an ecommerce store selling fashion may want to focus on getting users to view a product page and add items to their cart, while an ecommerce store selling electronics may want to encourage users to read product reviews before making a purchase. Different industries require different approaches, and the conversion funnel should be tailored to the industry in order to maximize conversions.

1. Retail ECommerce Funnel:

• Awareness: Potential customers become aware of the product/brand through online ads, word-of-mouth, and social media.
• Interest: Interested customers research the product/brand by reading reviews and visiting the website.
• Desire: Potential customers browse the website to learn more about the product/brand and compare with competitors.
• Action: Customers make a purchase decision and add items to their shopping cart.
• Conversion: Customers complete the purchase and become paying customers.

2. Travel ECommerce Funnel:

• Awareness: Potential customers become aware of the travel destination through online ads, word-of-mouth, and social media.
• Interest: Interested customers research the destination by reading reviews and visiting the website.

The traffic trends transforming the eCommerce conversion funnel

Data from the 2023 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark report shows that visitors to eCommerce sites last year (on both desktop and mobile) spent most of their session time on traditionally middle-of-funnel ‘consideration’ heavy product and category pages—and hardly any time at all on the top-of-funnel homepage.

Share of session time spent by page, by device

And this makes perfect sense when you consider where customers are coming from and the devices they’re using. 

Firstly, customers are increasingly alighting on eCommerce sites via paid search and social campaigns (not to mention influencer marketing). These campaigns often take visitors directly onto product description pages.

Traffic share by source, by industry

Secondly, it’s also crucial to remember that retail is the most mobile-led of industries. Last year, mobile drove nearly 3 in 4 (73.5%) visits to eCommerce sites. Of these visits, 55% were from new visitors (compared to 49% new visitors on desktop). 

And mobile visits are fleeting. Our research shows that visitors using mobile spend an average of only 2.6 minutes on eCommerce websites—under half the time (5.7 minutes) that desktop users spend. (What’s more, this time has dropped from 2.9 minutes in 2021.)

Time spent per session, by device, by industry, year-over-year

For a growing segment of eCommerce site visitors, the top of the eCommerce conversion funnel is (depending on how you look at it) being skipped entirely or is ‘sinking’ below the traditional top-of-funnel level. 

The new eCommerce conversion funnel looks more like this:

• Top/Middle of the funnel (TOFU/MOFU): Awareness and Consideration = Category/Search/Product pages
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): Intent/Purchase = Checkout/Purchase

What does the evolution of the eCommerce conversion funnel mean for retailers? 

The erosion of the traditional top of the eCommerce conversion funnel—and of time spent per session—has big implications for retailers looking to convert visitors into (ideally returning) customers.

Here are three things we suggest you do to adapt:

1. Bring your story deeper down the eCommerce conversion funnel

“Instead of spending the majority of your time and effort thinking around what we want to do higher up in the funnel, we should be thinking around, okay, what do we need to get across at PDP level from a story? How do we tell the story deeper in the funnel? Because that’s clearly where customers are migrating to?”

–Tom Parker, Site Optimization Manager, Marks and Spencer

Brand stories are extremely important. A brand story differentiates your business in the eyes of consumers. It helps build loyalty and lifetime value—vital when considering the hefty expense of relying on paid and new traffic.

When visitors come to your eCommerce brand through the top of the funnel, you have ample opportunities to tell them your brand story, showcase your identity and progressively nurture the sort of relationship with them that will keep them coming back in future.

However, with an increasing chunk of visitors (particularly new-to-you visitors) now coming in via paid campaigns and straight on product pages, you can no longer assume they’ll be exposed to that top-funnel story—or at least, not on the pages where TOFU content traditionally sits.

And given the decreasing time spent per session, particularly on mobile, they’re not necessarily going to have (or want to spend the) time to familiarize themselves with your non-product pages.

That’s why you need to think about working your brand story into the pages visitors are arriving on first: category and product pages.

A product page now needs to sell more than the product itself—it needs to sell your brand, too. Category, search and even checkout pages also need to pull more weight. 

2. Segment your audience to personalize every experience

With a myriad of traffic sources now bringing visitors to eCommerce sites, segmenting your audience is more important than ever. 

You need to segment when analyzing customer behavior to understand what each segment is motivated by. Then you need to be mindful of that motivation when tailoring your experience to serve each visitor a personalized experience, based on the segment they belong to, that takes them exactly where they want to go, as fast as possible. 

And this awareness needs to extend to the device they’re using to interact with your experience. Desktop users may have more appetite for delving into your product range, or consuming in-depth content that familiarizes them with your brand. 

Mobile users, by contrast, will probably be less inclined to browse around your website and delve deep into content, especially if they’ve arrived via a paid ad campaign that highlights a particular product. For them, efficiency will be paramount.

Data from the 2023 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark report shows that a buying session tends to be a lot deeper than a normal session. Across all retail, the average page views per buying session is 25.4 pages, compared to the overall average session depth of 5 pages.

This insight highlights the need to continue optimizing product pages—including out-of-stock product pages—and encourage users to view more product pages with ‘You may also like’, ‘Wear it with’, ‘Bestsellers’ carousels. 

However, when it comes to certain consumer segments, a low session depth doesn’t necessarily indicate a failure to convert—far from it. In fact, the evolution of the eCommerce conversion funnel suggests that many customers want to get deeper into the journey faster—and get to the checkout as fast as possible.

3. Forget the funnel: Optimize your experience from end to end

“Every detail matters. When you go through your site page by page, write down anything that bothers you. When you test these small things and take a data-driven approach to optimization, you’ll find a lot of savings in the details. It’s all about making a frictionless purchase experience for your customers.” 

—David Ting, CTO, Zenni Optical

When optimizing your customer journeys, prioritization must go to the pages customers are engaging with most frequently: Category, Product and Search. 

But with entry points to your sites now being so varied and unpredictable, it’s absolutely imperative that you have a clear understanding of what’s going on at every stage of the customer journey.

The fact is that wherever in the funnel your visitors are when they’re on your website, they’ll be frustrated by friction and engaged by User Experience design that encourages them to interact. To that extent, at least, the on-site conversion funnel matters less than the overall experience. 

And what you should be aiming for with that experience is to remove friction (such as, but not limited to, slow loading pages) and increase engagement (and user activity) throughout. 

For the full details on what’s causing friction in eCommerce experiences—and about the value of promoting user activity, you should check out the report.

See how your digital experience stacks up.

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Only by having (properly segmented) insight into how customers are behaving on every page on your website—and why they’re behaving as they are—can you ensure that your experience is truly optimized for conversion from end to end.

And only an AI-powered Digital Experience Analytics (DXA) solution like Contentsquare’s Digital Experience Analytics Cloud will give you that insight.

(It will certainly save you from trawling through your website and writing everything down as David Ting suggests above, though you should still keep your notepad handy!)

Optimize for the eCommerce conversion funnel with Contentsquare

Unlike traditional analytics solutions, our DXA platform doesn’t stop at showing you how many visitors are arriving on your website, clicking on stuff and bouncing, exiting or converting.

It also shows you what’s going on between clicks (via Zone-Based Heatmaps) , how customers are progressing through your site (via Customer Journey Analysis) and what the root causes of customer behavior (via Session Replay).

Plus, platform features like CS Insights leverage machine learning to bring high priority client-side issues (such as technical errors) to your attention before they lose you customers

To learn more about how leading eCommerce have used Contentsquare to optimize their experiences, check out our article on eCommerce conversion rate optimization strategies.

Or why not see for yourself what Contentsquare can do for your website and your eCommerce conversion funnel with a quick product tour? 

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The post The eCommerce conversion funnel is changing: Here’s 3 strategies to help you adapt appeared first on Contentsquare.