Helping Mobile Users Convert
Off to Cairns today where I’ll be giving a presentation on how to boost revenue on a website. It’s been a real eye-opener since switching to a revenue focused model and I’m learning new things all the time. Drops in old metrics that used to be cause for panic, such as organic traffic, bounce rates and eCommerce conversion rates, are no longer such an issue because I’ve learnt to focus on the one true marker; revenue.
What I learned
- The simple tactics to boost revenue
- Why not clicking on ads is outdated thinking
- Why organic falls can be great news for mobile
- Why you should over-charge your brand/li>
- Mobile display should adjust your thinking
- Speed is more than just load times
Transcript
Hey, welcome back, Rankers. Sorry if we get a bit of noise today. There’s a lot of heavy weather about and playing havoc with the studio. I’m off to Cairns this afternoon. For those of you who don’t know where it is, it’s a long way away from where I am. It’s about 32 hours’ drive up north in the tropics. We’ll be talking about basically things that you can do on your site today to boost your revenue, right? So it’ll be a lot of fun.
But the sorts of things we’re going to be talking about, and I’ll just show you, because I’ve been doing this a long time. When you see stuff that you haven’t seen before, you go, “Oh, well, that’s very interesting. I haven’t seen that before.” That’s certainly what’s happening since we have moved to focusing on revenue for clients.
Be an ad clicker
So let me just show you the one to start with. There’s a lot of myths, I guess, about the way that we use the web. We always used to get told by clients, “Oh, I never click on the ads.” That was basically 2009 or something like that. Everyone clicks on the ads now, all right? So if you’re one of those people that don’t click on the ads, you’re a minority now, okay? Because people don’t care anymore, and here’s a case in point.
So you can see here this is organic traffic, and this is month-on-month, sorry year-on-year, so March, as up until yesterday, versus March last year. You can see there we’ve had a massive drop in organic traffic. We’ve had a 31% decrease in organic traffic and 23% decrease in mobile, I should say. So some massive drops there.
You can see the sessions are down, bounce rate’s worse, pages per session slightly better, average session duration down, e-commerce conversion rate down although mobile is up a lot, which is good. Then you have a look at transactions are down, but then you have a look at this. Revenue was up. What? Yeah, revenue was up. You can see on mobile it’s up significantly.
Now, that’s less traffic, more money, right? The reason there’s less traffic is because we’ve got a Google Ads campaign going as well, which is absolutely killing it on mobile. So let’s not forget when you do a search on mobile, most of the screen that you will see from most searches is just going to be ads, right? So this is why people say over charge your brand, right? Because you don’t know who else is going to be there. You don’t know what other terms people are going to associate with your brand, whether someone else is going to broad match on those other terms, all these other things.
Basically, obviously, you’ve got to measure, right? So you’ve got to measure you’re getting the right return. We go down now to a very granular level because I want to understand what’s happening with certain devices, with certain navigation functions or certain products. Do we find that people on mobile behave differently? Well, yeah, they do. We know that. The main thing that they want to do is they want to find things quickly.
All about speed
So when I have a look at this, this is a, let’s just say it’s a navigation feature that we’ve put in, and it’s a way just to help users find what they want. What I’m looking at here now is organic sessions, so people coming in from well, Google, from SEO work. You can see there we’ve had double the amount of mobile users use this function, which is what it was for. So if they couldn’t get to it before, they couldn’t see it before, now it’s easier for them to see. You can see there Google has actually … Well, this isn’t new traffic from Google. This is new traffic using that function, I should say.
But it’s worked, I would say, by anyone’s standard even though e-commerce conversion rate’s down overall for desktop. We’ve had a 418% increase in revenue through that channel, and that much of it, all 8600% has been mobile, who the design change was for. So tick, that one’s worked.
Now, some may say, “Well, so I’m not worried about these figures that say where our session times are down or any of those sorts of things.” Overall, the site, and this is, once again we’re looking at year-on-year for March, and this is … What’s that? That’s an extra above last year 85%. So we’re up 85% revenue for this retailer on last year.
Those changes that we’ve been doing this month have all been about helping the user solve the problem quickly. They’ve all been about essentially a speed, speed of transaction, speed of finding the product, speed of the page loading, and these are all really just performance issues.
If I could tell you one thing that you could do, even though that last one I showed you of 8600% seems extraordinary and it is, it’s basically all we’re doing is helping the user get to their purchase as quickly as they can. This is why I don’t worry about things like bounce rates or session times as you saw with that organic. Everything was down. Everything was down. If you just focus on your e-commerce conversion rate, you’re going to get yourself into trouble as well.
All of a sudden, you get a lot more new traffic, as we can just see here. As we saw before, one of them’s 48% down on the conversion rate, but then revenue is way up. So it’s important to focus on the right things, and that’s what we’re going to be doing at Cairns tomorrow and talking and showing people how we do these things. If you’d like to learn more, then please subscribe and share. We’ve got the book coming out, so if you want a copy of that, just email [email protected]. We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much, everyone. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
