E-commerce marketers often spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours a month driving traffic to their web sites through Pay Per Click (PPC), content development and other Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques. The logic is the more traffic on the site the greater the sales volume … While this is essentially true they often forget about the all important Conversion Rate. Conversion Rate Optimization can require a costly investment in both time and technology putting it out of reach for many mid-sized e-commerce sites. We can’t argue that. It does take dedication and diligence to set up A/B page testing, pull metrics, analyze and test some more.
But there are however, some simple ways to increase your conversion rates without breaking your budget. One easy way is to make your site search more prominent. Did you know that site visitors who use websites internal search to find items convert, on average, 15% higher than users who go through a sites navigational structure. And yet many sites hide their search box or it appears as an afterthought in the overall site design.
For example, an extreme example, Shopzilla’s homepage is dominated by a search box. They do offer category navigation on the right side of the page but they would much rather you ‘SEARCH’ for the items you are looking for. Not only will this help Shopzilla’s conversion rates, it will also give them vital data to help promote and grow their business. By using the search box you are telling Shopzilla what type of products you would like to see on their site and what the most popular items in a given time period are.
This data is just as useful to a small to mid sized e-comm site as it is for the E-commerce giants. We often get wrapped up in what products people purchased during a particular time of year but it is often more important to know what people would have liked to purchase.
Just a little data to reinforce site search and it’s benefits. This historical data was pulled from a 50Fish client during the last calendar year.
While only 6% of these site visitors used the search, they accounted for 40% of the revenue. They also had an over 400% higher conversion rate and over 570% higher per visit value. These stats form the previous 30 days tell the story:
Number of visitors who did NOT use site search: 131,786 visits
124,073 Visits — Percent of Site Total: 94.15%
$110,773 Revenue — Percent of Site Total: 60.46%
909Transactions — Percent of Site Total: 69.06%
$121.86 Average Value — Site Avg: $142.12 (-13.13%)
0.73% E-commerce Conversion Rate — Site Avg: 1.00% (-27.26%)
$0.89 Per Visit Value – Site Avg: $1.42 (-35.78%)
Number of visitors who USED site search: 7,771 visits
7,771 Visits — Percent of Site Total: 5.85%
$74,489 Revenue — Percent of Site Total: 39.71%
403Transactions — Percent of Site Total: 30.53%
$184.84 Average Value — Site Avg: $142.12 (+30.06%)
5.19% E-commerce Conversion Rate — Site Avg: 1.00% (+418.73%)
$9.59 Per Visit Value — Site Avg: $1.42 (+574.66%)
The moral of the story is, pay attention to your site search and your conversion rates will thank you. We will break down using Analytics to track search and best practices for displaying site search in future blog posts.
