E-Commerce Websites Archives

By Kaushal Thakkar.

A testament to its reliability and rigidity, e-commerce is expected to cultivate even greater results once the pandemic subsides

With the monumental shift in all marketplaces amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the e-commerce sector has emerged more unscathed than other sectors. A testament to its reliability and rigidity, e-commerce is expected to cultivate even greater results once the pandemic subsides. This shift can be attributed to the major change seen in customer behaviours and their growing preference for online transactions.

For instance, the U.S retail sector saw consumers spending over $146 billion on online transactions, which is a 14.5% rise compared to last year. Moreover, the U.S daily e-commerce sales also saw a significant 49% rise from April 1st to April 23rd, when compared to 1st-11th March, when the pandemic was not in its full effect.

So, the main concern for e-commerce businesses now is how to generate traffic organically on their websites/portals and gain more consumers? Let us take a closer look at this predicament and the possible solutions.

DATA – More enticing and relevant than you might think!

Ever wondered what makes e-commerce giants like Amazon, JD, Walmart, Alibaba, and many more stand out in terms of the heights they are reaching? If you delve into the details, you will also come across questions such as how are they able to offer better and seamless customer experience and position themselves as the top search results on search engines?

The collective answer to these questions is that these e-commerce giants are heavily data-driven in their operations. Not only this, but they also implement the intrinsically analytical outcomes of data processing to get a better view of the market and customer behaviours.

Now, becoming data-driven in operations can be a major hurdle for e-commerce websites if not done correctly. But here is how e-commerce giants smartly and viscerally approach the implementation of data-driven reports to generate traffic on their websites:

1. Mobile-First Indexing

Over 52% of web searches are done via mobile devices. Hence, the first and foremost element that e-commerce businesses should concentrate on is indexing their websites for mobiles, as it can significantly impact their search rankings.

Mobile websites are going to be crawled first by Google’s bots and indexed to be shown as preferred search results for mobile users. Making a mobile-friendly website, optimizing it for increasing page loading speeds, and streamlining the UX are the key determiners for attracting more visits to the website.

2. Building Up Steadfast SEO Strategies

Implementing a data-driven approach on various domains while creating SEO strategies has helped major e-commerce websites create the best marketing campaigns in their respective domains. For instance, knowing your conversion rates and bounce rates can help you determine the areas you are lagging behind and developing SEO strategies to bridge that gap that can significantly improve your figures.

Similarly, knowing how much time a customer is spending on your website can let you know if the customers are closing your website quickly and why they are doing it. This can help you in building competent SEO strategies to battle the problem statements detected from collecting data for the same.

3. Conducting Comprehensive Keyword Research

It is a widely known fact that keyword research is one of the most important elements in SEO. Hence, conducting keyword research based on data collected through consumer behaviour, search patterns, and search volume are very imperative to attain higher search engine rankings. Moreover, determining the right keywords to implement on your website, which aligns well with your products/services or what your potential customers are searching for can propel your website visits to a whole new level.

4. Publishing Only Data-Driven SEO Content

Writing keyword flooded content with little to no context or girth to its meaning is a tried and failed strategy. Identifying your target demographic, analysing what type of content they read or respond to, and what benefits they are seeking to achieve from the content is the first stepping stone of data-driven content.

Now, the next step is to make the content have a ”goal”, which encourages the reader to make desirable actions, while simultaneously educating them on what they searched for. The data-driven approach comes into play at the front gates when determining what actions you want the reader to take.

5. Spotlighting Product Reviews

Any e-commerce business would know the power held by product and service reviews when it comes to customer retention and acquisition. Positive reviews not only safeguard the brand image of e-commerce businesses but also prove them to be socially credible, which in turn attracts more visitors on the website.

Over 67% of the customers are influenced by reviews, which becomes a major factor in driving more traffic on e-commerce websites. Moreover, product reviews, whether bad or good, are also an integral factor in improving conversion rates if they are promptly responded to.

6. Leveraging Forms and Surveys to Collect Customer Data

The use of forms and surveys can significantly help e-commerce businesses in getting a collective overview of their customers’ feedback and requirements. There are three types of customer data you can potentially obtain from surveys and forms, which are:

Purchase History: To help e-commerce businesses analyse the buying patterns of the customers to suggest them with the best-suited products exclusively.
Geographic Data: To help e-commerce businesses in finding out the most common locations from where most of their revenue is coming, along with focusing on promising or primary locations for determining key market regions.
Customer Demographics: Collecting customer information such as average income, occupations, gender, age, etc., to determine your key target audience. This can help in creating targeted and successful marketing strategies.

Being Data-Driven is the Call of the Future

Building an e-commerce website and making it attractive for the target demographics is a data-based activity in today’s digital world. Knowing the customer behaviours, competitor tactics, updates in SEO guidelines, and much more are the key determining factors of an e-commerce website’s success.

Keeping the aforementioned points in mind, it is safe to say that a data-driven approach is a make or break factor that e-commerce businesses should take very seriously. Collecting, Analysing, and Implementing – These are the three pillars of a successful data-driven approach, that can help budding e-commerce websites in generating as much or even more visits as are being generated by e-commerce giants.

Feature Image Credit: Pixabay

By Kaushal Thakkar

Founder, Infidigit

Sourced from Entrepreneur India

By: Alan Coleman

Bringing some insights from the Wolfgang E-Commerce KPI Study 2020.

The annual study provides KPI benchmark data which allow digital marketers analyze their 2019 performance and plan their 2020. The most popular section in the report amongst Moz readers has always been the conversion correlation, where we crunch the numbers to see what sets the high-performing websites apart.

We’re privileged to count a number of particularly high-performance websites among our dataset participants. There have been over twenty international digital marketing awards won by a spread of participant websites in the last three years. In these findings, you’re getting insights from the global top tier of campaigns.

If we take a five-year look-back, we can see the conversion correlation section acts as an accurate predictor of upcoming trends in digital marketing.

In our 2016 study, the two stand-out correlations with conversion rate were:

High-performing websites got more significantly paid search traffic than the chasing pack.
High-performing websites got significantly more mobile traffic than the chasing pack.

The two strongest overall trends in our 2020 report are:

It’s the first year in which paid search has eclipsed organic for website revenue.
It’s the first year the majority of revenue has come from mobile devices.

This tells us that the majority of websites have now caught up with what the top-performing websites were doing five years ago.

So, what are the top performing websites doing differently now?

These points of differentiation are likely to become the major shifts in the online marketing mix over the next 5 years.

Let’s count down to the strongest correlation in the study:

4. Race back up to the top! Online PR and display deliver conversions

For the majority of the 2010s, marketers were racing to the bottom of the purchase funnel. More and more budget flowed to search to win exposure to the cherished searcher — that person pounding on their keyboard with their credit card between their teeth, drunk on the newfound novelty of online shopping. The only advertising that performed better than search was remarketing, which inched the advertising closer and closer to that precious purchase moment.

Now in 2020, these essential elements of the marketing mix are operating at maximum capacity for any advertiser worth their salt. Top performing websites are now focusing extra budget back up towards the top of the funnel. The best way to kill the competition on Search is to have the audience’s first search, be your brand. Outmarket your competition by generating more of your cheapest and best converting traffic, luvly brand traffic. We saw correlations with Average Order Value from websites that got higher than average referral traffic (0.34) and I can’t believe I’m going to write this, but display correlated with a conversion success metric, Average Order Value (0.37). I guess there’s a first time for everything!

3. Efficiencies of scale

Every budding business student knows that when volume increases, cost per unit decreases. It’s called economies of scale. But what do you call it when it’s revenue per unit that’s increasing with volume? At Wolfgang, we call it efficiencies of scale. Similar to last year’s report, one of the strongest correlations against a number of the success metrics was simply the number of sessions. More visitors to the site equals a higher conversion rate per user (0.49). This stat summons the final wag for the long-tail of smaller specialist retailers. This finding is consistent across both the retail and travel sectors.

And it illustrates another reversal of a significant trend in the 2010s. The long-tail of retailers were the early settlers in the e-commerce land of plenty. Very specialist websites with a narrow product range could capture high volumes of traffic and sales.

For example, www.outboardengines.com could dominate the SERP and then affiliate link or dropship product, making for a highly profitable small business. The entrepreneur behind this microbusiness could automate the process and replicate the model again and again for the products of her choosing. Timothy Ferris’ book, The 4 Hour Work Week, became the bible to the first flush of digital nomads; affiliate conferences in Vegas saw leaning towers of chips being pushed around by solopreneur digital marketers with wild abandon.

Alas, by the end of the decade, Google had started to prioritize brands in the SERP, and the big players had finally gotten their online act together. As a result, we are now seeing significant ‘efficiencies of scale’ as described above

2. Attract that user back

What’s the key insight digital marketers need to act upon to succeed in the 2020s? Average Sessions per Visitor is 2, Average Sessions per Purchaser is 5.

In other words, the core role of the marketer is to create an elegant journey across touchpoints to deliver a person from two click prospect to five click purchaser. Any activity which increases sessions per visitor will increase conversion. Similar to last year’s report, another of the strongest and most consistent correlations was the number of Sessions per User (0.7) — which emphasizes the importance of this metric.

So where should a marketer seek these extra interactions?

Check out the strongest correlation we found with conversion success in the Wolfgang KPI Report 2020….

1. The social transaction

The three strongest conversion correlations across the 4,000 datapoints were related to social transactions. This tells us that the very top performing websites were significantly better than everybody else at generating traffic from social that purchases.

Google Analytics is astonishingly rigorous at suppressing social media success stats. It appears they would rather have an inferior analytics product than accurately track cross-device conversions and give social its due. They can track cross-device conversions in Google Ads — why not in Analytics? So, if our Google Analytics data is telling us social is the strongest conversion success factor, we need to take notice.

This finding runs in parallel with recent research by Forrester which finds one-third of CMOs still don’t know what to do with social.

Our correlation calc finds that social is the biggest point of difference between the high flyers and the chasing pack. The marketers who do know how to use social, are the tip top performing marketers of the bunch. We also have further findings on how to out-market the competition on social in the full study.

Here’s the top tier of correlations we extracted from a third of a billion euro in online revenues and over 100 million website visits:

Retail

A screenshot of a cell phone

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Travel

Overall

To read more of our findings pertaining to:

The social sweet spot
Average conversion rates in your industry
In-store sales benchmarked
Why data is the new oil
2010 was the decade of the…
And much, much more

Have a look at the full e-commerce KPI report for 2020. If you found yourself with any questions or anecdotes relating to the data shared here, please let us know in the comments!

By: Alan Coleman

About Alan_Coleman — Alan set up Wolfgang Digital in 2007 at his kitchen table as a specialist paid search agency. Wolfgang Digital is now the European Search Awards “Grand Prix” Prize holders and holds the “Best Agency” title in Ireland’s Digital Media Awards.Alan lectures part-time for the Digital Marketing Institute and talks at conferences including SXSW Interactive, The Web Summit, SES London, AdWorld Experience Bologna and Omcap Berlin.When not digital marketing Alan can be found trail running or sea swimming. He has written for State of Search, The Guardian UK, and Moz about digital marketing.