7 ways to optimise for strong product pages

This article touches on specific items for product pages, assuming basic on-page optimisation processes have been followed, we have covered these in my  Smart Insights On-Page optimisation Guide if you're not familiar with these basics.

1 Check Products have Unique URLs

Ecommerce systems are complex, they have a lot to do and unfortunately are not usually designed with things like Unique product URL's in mind. An example of what I mean by this could be: www.example.com/product-1.html = The primary shortest product URL you can visit to see the product www.example.com/category-1/product-1.html = Navigating to the product page after viewing a category page www.example.com.category-1/sub-category-1/product-1.html = Navigating through two categories before selecting the product Each of the pages above are unique to Search Engines as the URL's are different. However, the content on each will be exactly the same. To ensure you are not display all these duplicate pages to Google…

New data show how number of reviews can lift conversion rate

In the first generation of social commerce, measuring the sales impact of adding reviews to a site was enough. But now it’s time to dig deeper into the real ROI of social. Our ability to measure the ROI of social hasn’t always kept up with the latest developments. We can all count fans, likes and retweets, but businesses often struggle when it comes to tying these figures to their revenue. This is one of the great advantages of including reviews in your social commerce strategy: with a little effort, it’s possible to track almost every part of their impact.

Why does review volume matter?

By now, most businesses understand that reviews can help conversion. But, what volume is needed to help conversion? Is a handful of reviews enough or should you aim for a minimum number of reviews? If a few reviews deliver…

A practical tool to determining which days and times work best

Value/Importance: [rating=4] Recommended link: Optimisation Beacon

Our commentary

I loved this simple, yet powerful way of seeing which times are the peak for conversion. This post from Robert Kingston shows you how to extract data from Google Analytics and then display it on a spreadsheet using this format: You can download the spreadsheet template and Robert also provides a pre-built custom report to obtain the data you need: (more…)…

Form conversion optimisation tips and recommendations

Unless you sell online, chances are one of the main objectives of your website is to generate online enquiries or new business leads. Dependant on your products and services, you may want visitors to pick up the phone and make an enquiry, or alternatively you may prefer visitors fill out your enquiry form and send their details to you. This post will focus on providing tips and recommendations for those of you who would like to increase online enquiries.

What makes a good enquiry form? Not always the usual best-practice

Some of the best practice techniques we hear again and again about enquiry forms are: Keep them simple Don’t ask for too much information Don’t ask lots of questions This generally translates in to asking your visitor for their name, email address, phone number and then a text field for them to submit their enquiry. But it's always good to test conventional…

Best practice tips and examples for optimising your checkout

This article explores the variety of checkout options available, as well as common consumer pre-conceptions of registration, best practice tips and recommended approaches in order to optimise your checkout for new customers looking to place their first order. Before I press ahead into the meat of the post, lets set-out a few reasons why marketers should bother investing time and effort in getting new customer checkout 'right'. Abandoned checkouts have always been a huge problem for many brands, and they continue to be so Once you have a new customer, you open up many more ways to engage with them, nurture them and encourage them to ultimately spend more and increase their lifetime order value with brand You may well have invested significant amounts to acquire the new visitor/prospect to your site, and the more new visitors convert to customers, the better your ROI on acquisition…

A PDF download on Analytics and the Google Website Optimiser

Value: [rating=4] Our commentary: Published by Wiley and written by a team from Google, led by Alan Wrafter. These free Ebooks aren't full length, so don't expect it to be as good as a full guide. In particular Chapter 2 is too brief to be valuable, but Chapter 3 is a good intro to GWO. However there are no examples which we see in so many books and blogs including the Google Conversion Room blog, it's a shame they couldn't be included here. It's great to have free introductory books, but for serious reference / how to works I still recommend these books on Google Analytics. Marketing implications: This is the structure, you can see that the book covers a wide range of topics from…

Best practice advice in conversion optimisation and AB Testing

Value: [rating=5]

Our commentary: I was talking recently to Ben Jesson, CEO of Conversion Rate Experts to set up an interview we'll have soon on creating the business case and using the right process for conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

I mentioned it would be great if they could share some of their well-known presentations from conversion rate and search marketing conferences, so it's great to see their first from the recent Think Visibility conference, presented by Karl Blanks. Enjoy!

Gruesome conversion-killing mistakes

View more presentations from Conversion Rate Experts.

Marketing implications: Here's our pick - it's worth viewing fullscreen in Slideshare to pick up some…

With checkout abandonment increasing to a staggering 48% in the UK according to Coremetrics, there is a clear need for many retailers to pore over this report and extract the key insights. The Econsultancy Guide to Checkout Optimisation report is structured around the different steps of the process and contains 70 tips. The best feature of the report IMO is a checklist in the appendix which lists all 70 with prompts of what to look for when comparing to the competition. If you run an Ecommerce site print this out and fill it in! In my brief review I highlight 5 of the less obvious tips which I picked up, which apply to most types of site. Let's start the review with...

What we don't like / what's missing?

The report has a fixation on abandonment (naturally), so focuses relentlessly on reducing this rate, so missing some opportunities. I believe that recommendations on any…

Site owners are naturally looking for where they can make the biggest improvements with the least effort in terms of resource and cost. I think this has led to the popularity of landing page optimisation through AB and multivariate testing.

The table shows that the use of KPIs is quite well understood today, with most marketers knowing their conversion rates from their bounce rates and AOV. Likewise, improving calls-to-action and development of landing pages has a relatively good level of focus.

But, the chart shows that most think there are many other areas they need to give more attention to. For me journey analysis is a key activity.

I think there are two issues here, first where visitors are routed to when they first come to the site and secondly, the journeys forward from the initial pages.

How effective is your traffic routeing?

While…

Please complete this site optimisation research to help us  improve our understanding of best practices for using AB and multivariate testing to improve site conversion rates. Complete site optimisation survey Through completing the survey myself, I'm sure that doing the survey and reading the summary report will change the way you approach marketing improvements to your site. This research is by Conversion rate optimisation expert Craig Sullivan who has extensive experience of conversion optimisation through positions at a range of transactional e-commerce sites including John Lewis, Ocado, Lovefilm and most recently Belron. As a thank you, Craig will share insights with everyone who helps or participates - You'll also be entered into a prize draw for an iPod Touch 16Gb or a £200 donation to your favourite charity. Craig is also developing a "Holistic Site Health Check" which I have been reviewing and I'm looking forward to sharing that with you shortly. Readers of this…