92% of customers who visit an eCommerce store do not make a purchase*. This could be for a multitude of reasons such as the site being slow, confusing navigation, poor content and painful checkout process. 

Many marketers focus on driving traffic rather than onsite experience the traffic will encounter once they reach the site. If you’re running paid advertising and directing traffic to your eCommerce site, ensuring the page experience delivered meets the user intent can be the ultimate factor between success and failure. 

88% of online shoppers say they wouldn’t return to a website after having a bad experience**. 

User experience is critical to the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns. When directing users to your website, greater ROI can be achieved by optimising the user journey. 

Optimising your website should already be a key driving factor into your eCommerce growth, not only does it support converting traffic but it’s also a ranking factor for Google. If you haven’t already read our blog post on Google’s Core Web vitals and how they impact eCommerce, you can read in full here. 

In this blog post, we take a quick look at how you can improve your eCommerce store to convert more traffic from paid advertising. 

What’s the ‘What’?

First start with the ‘What’. Think about what it is that you’re promoting and what you want users to do. Let’s say you’re running an offer for one of your products, no doubt this offer is exceedingly clear on the ad, so you need to mirror this on to the page you’re driving them too. It wouldn’t make sense to send them to a homepage if you’re promoting a particular product. 

Now, on that page, make sure the offer is clear, if the user still sees the full price, they’re going to run - and fast! Now, what is it that you want them to do, purchase one, purchase two, share with a friend, see similar products? Make the user journey clear and easy to follow - not only that, but make sure they can purchase the offer with ease. 

Performance 

So now you know ‘what’ it is you want the user to do, make sure they can complete those actions. If your page is slow to load, isn’t responsive or has too many things going on such as pop-ups, you’re at risk of losing your traffic. 

Check the performance of your page and also your whole eCommerce store by using performance scoring tools such as Lighthouse. This enables you to gather insight on what’s working on your website and what needs improving to create the best user experience. 

Merchandising 

Just as you would expect when entering a brick and mortar store, you want the shop front to have a great visual display, the shop floor to be tidy with a great variety of stock. Your eCommerce store works the same way, and this is called merchandising. 

Effective merchandising can produce higher sales, generate more satisfied customers and increase loyalty. Make sure your website has nothing but professional, high quality images, text is legible, place CTA’s (Calls to Action) strategically and add reminders for abandoned cart.  

Homepage 

Your homepage will most likely be your most visited page on your site - first impressions really do count. If your ads are driving traffic here, make sure the end action is really clear. Make the homepage easy to navigate, create engaging content and ensure all this content is accessible on any device. 

Things to consider:

• Promote trending products 
• Promote highest converting products 
• Reduce clicks to product pages with access to an easy to use navigation and intuitive site search bar 
• Showcase products with high ratings 
  

Product pages 

The same goes if your ads are pointing specifically to a product page, however, make sure your content is exactly what your users want to see. Not only that, but the right content will also help you optimise your product pages, supporting their appearance in search engine results. 

Things to consider:

• Product imagery and or videos 
• Reviews 
• Detailed product descriptions 
• Product specifications
• Cross-sell/upsell products 
• Strong ‘add to basket’ CTA
• Product variations, including size, colour 
• In stock information 
• Details on delivery 
  

Summary

Your paid advertising campaign isn’t ready until your eCommerce store has been fully optimised. With irresistible user journeys, you are much more likely to convert your traffic and celebrate over having a successful campaign. 

At 9xb, we work with businesses that need support improving user experience and performance across their eCommerce store to increase conversion rates and online revenue. Conversion rate optimisation, also known as CRO, is a technique used to enhance your website. Our in-house team of CRO experts specialise in research, planning and implementation of onsite improvements to help businesses generate more sales.

To find out more, get in touch. 

‍*Episever

**Amazon