In this case study you’ll learn how without additional ad spend, Conversion Rate Optimisation contributed over 3 months to:

• Increase revenue by 75% when comparing year over year and 32.6% when compared to the previous period despite being during a record low in consumer spend for these industries.
• Increase the number of transactions by 60.6% when comparing year over year and 26.5% when compared to the previous period.
• Increase revenue per user by 46.8% when comparing year over year and 31.6% when compared to the previous period
• Increased E-commerce Conversion Rate by 33.9% when comparing year over year and 25% when compared to the previous period

How we Increased Ecommerce Conversion Rate by 33.9% and Revenue per User by 46.8%?

• Improved user experience by updating the mobile menu to include key categories and subcategories
• Improved user experience by removing path relative links on the desktop mega menu and main navigation.
• Improved user experience by making key product categories easier to access
• Fixed key technical errors that contributed to poor UX from paid marketing channels.
• Remove broken links on key pages

The Client and the Website

Our client is an established Australian B2C Brand in the homewares industry that runs a brick and mortar store, a wholesale division and an ecommerce store.

As most businesses built on social media, to date, most of their online traffic comes as a result of their paid social media efforts, with almost all organic search and paid search traffic being branded.

Awareness is built through social and organic and paid search just capture people searching for the brand name.

The Challenge

After 2 years of declining performance over all digital channels the business faced increased costs of advertising due to:

• The need to increase frequency of creating new assets/creative to keep poor performing ads fresh
• Increased ad spend required to battle poor tracking and saturated audiences
• Increasing CPC and effectiveness of advertising

The business was required to take measures to increase customer spend and decrease cost of acquisition.

All our SEO campaigns here at Structural SEO start with Conversion Rate Optimisation efforts in parallel with our SEO process. This case study goes over the results of our initial CRO efforts

The Solution

Address Conversion Rate Optimisation issues as soon as possible to get more value out of the same marketing efforts without increase in ad spend. Then use the additional revenue to invest on improving neglected and poorly managed marketing channels.

When it comes to Conversion Rate Optimisation for an ecommerce store, the goal is to increase the percentage of people who purchase independently from the number of actual visitors you are working with. It’s about getting more out of each visitor to improve return on investment, not increasing traffic to the website.

The Results

After analysing the first 3 months since implementing the changes we saw an increase in the e-commerce conversion rate by a whopping 33.9% when compared to the same period in the previous year and 25% when compared to the previous period before the changes were made.

Marketing Channel Breakdowns

Using Google Analytics default last click attribution model we realise that on both

15 Dec 2022 – 15 Mar 2023 vs 15 Dec 2021 – 15 Mar 2022

15 Dec 2022 – 15 Mar 2023 vs 15 Sept 2022 – 14 Dec 2022

Understanding Conversion Rate Optimisation Comparisons: Year Over Year vs Previous Period

Comparing results against the same period in the previous year (year over year comparison) or against the immediate previous period has both benefits and negative aspects to each.

Year over year comparisons:

• Are helpful to account for seasonality but,
• Don’t account for external economic factors (inflation, strength of the economy),
• Usually have a bigger difference in the amount of users that visit the website than previous period comparisons. KPI’s should be normalised by users or sessions to account for the variation that a larger or smaller number of users would do to absolute metrics like revenue and number of transactions. 

Previous period comparisons:

• Are helpful to account for external economic factors to the business such as inflation and the strength of the economy.
• Usually have less variation in the number of users, product range offer and marketing efforts than when comparing to the previous year

Comparing both year over year and previous period performance is helpful to get a holistic view of the results of ecommerce conversion rate optimisation efforts.

Comparing number of interactions required to purchase

The punchline here is that more revenue and more orders were achieved with less website interactions.

Both year over year and when compared to the previous period, roughly 40% of users purchase on the first touchpoint and 35% of the revenue is made by users who interact with the website for the first time in a 90 day lookback window.

But what dramatically changed was the amount of website interactions required to achieve the same revenue.

In this case, comparing against the previous period is helpful because there was less than 1% variation in the number of users.

The following table seems intimidating, but reading it is simpler than what it looks.

Here’s how to read it:

For example if we look at the first row, we can see data for users that only visited the website once in order to take action. In this case we can see that:

• For the previous period, 43.3% of the transactions and 40.6% of the revenue came from users that only required one visit to the website.
• After the changes were made, users who bought on the first interaction with the website spent 13.2% more money and made 9.1% more transactions when compared to the previous period.

If we look at other rows we can see the behaviour and breakdowns for users that require more than one visit to the website before taking action. For example we can see that:

• Visitors who interacted with the website 2 or 3 times before purchasing spent 43.6% and 55.1% more money respectively
• Visitors who interacted with the website 2 or 3 times before purchasing made 18.9% and 10.8% more purchases respectively

• This means that more revenue and more orders were achieved with less website interactions despite the previous period being before Christmas where customer spend is historically high and the evaluated period has been well known across all industries for a drop in customer spend.

Key Takeaways

• Low cost and quick fixes to historical user experience issues can make a massive impact on ecommerce conversions and revenue in a very short period of time.

• Improving user experience for the devices where most of the website traffic comes from is a powerful way of getting more out of the people who are already visiting your website

• Having clear, logical and simple to use navigation, where category pages are easy to find is key to improve ecommerce conversion optimisation.

• CRO increases ROI of paid traffic as well as organic traffic sources increasing the efficiency of all marketing channels