Measuring UX changes across device/channel.
Greetings from the frozen tundra of Melbourne! We made a small UX change on mobile for a client recently and it’s had amazing results. It was aligned with my thought process of trying to make eCommerce as friendly and convenient as a bricks and mortar shopping experience. Removing this particular roadblock opened the floodgates to a 30% revenue increase on mobile!
- Why things should be easier on mobile.
- Stick to the retail basics.
- Why mobile often doesn’t convert as well.
- Always analyse your data after a change.
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers. How you going? Sorry it’s been so long. It’s bloody cold in Melbourne. Hope you’re busy. If you’re not, you probably should be talking to us! So give me a bell.
Another amazing small change!
Now I want to talk to you a little bit about another change that we did during the week, which was designed to make it easier for a certain type of user on a mobile site. Now, everything I say with these sorts of things, I’d like to take it back to when you walk into a bricks and mortar store, right? Because e-commerce, it’s a young industry with many assumptions over the last 20 years, probably not even 20 years, about what an e-commerce site should do, and what it should have, and how it should perform. But in doing that, we’ve lost a lot of the basics that are associated with retail.
Like when I walk into a store or I’ll find something, and I’ve told this story before, the quickest way for me to do it, rather than walk from aisle to aisle, to aisle, to aisle, to aisle, to aisle, to aisle, is to ask someone. If someone’s there, great. Now obviously we can’t always do that with an e-commerce site. Some people might say, “Well, there’s chat.” Yeah, chat maybe, but a lot of people don’t like using chat because these days I have to give over my details most of the time, before I can find out where a product is. Now when I go into a store, they don’t ask me to see my license, or get my address, or my email address before they tell me the product is, but we do it online. And there’s a lot of those sorts of little things.
And this client had sort of a product filtering thingy. Now we’ve removed it from mobile only because we said, “Let’s just test it. It’s been there a long time. We want to know how users are going to react. The site gets a lot of traffic. You got to be careful. So we’ll remove it from one device and then measure the different channels using that device and see how they’re going.”
So the idea was to increase mobile sales because they’re a much larger part of the audience for this client, but just weren’t converting as well. And we should be getting more sales from it. And typically that is the case with a lot of e-commerce sites, mobile just doesn’t convert as well.
So basically what we’re trying to do here is just reduce that cognitive load. Because as soon as you make that user think, when they’re on their mobile it’s like, “Oh boy.” It becomes too hard. It’s like when you… well, it’s what I’m going to liken it to anyway, going to Supercheap Auto, we’re going to Jaycar, and go into Bunnings. That’s about it.
But when you go to buy a car battery, or a battery for your mower, or your go-cart, or something like that, and you go into Supercheap Auto, they got this… and the same applies for wipers and bloody, all different car parts and stuff. You’re like, you got to look through all these charts and these models and… Now, if you can’t find that in there, you’re leaving, right? Or you’re going to say to someone, because you’re short of time, “Mate, I just need some wipers for a Datsun 280B”, or something. “Do you have any?” And that’s the quickest way to do it, right? But on an e-commerce site, if you’re making people go through these complex filtering processes, or looking up tables, or whatever it is, you’re going to lose that sale. People just don’t want to do that. They just don’t want to be hooked up to your site and they don’t want to give out their details before they find out if they’ve got the product you want. Right? Simple as that.
How SEO can affect ads
So, by removing this little app at the top of the mobile page, it made more people start to use mobile. And the result was we increased, let me just take you back to that, organic mobile traffic increased revenue by 30%. So that’s revenue up 30% from mobile traffic. Now that’s over the course of, we’re not even three weeks into this yet. Right? So already we’ve made… And I’ll show you the other channels where we’re seeing some great uptake. So 30% revenue up on users on mobile using search, all right? And the biggest winners there were, once again, organic, and also direct traffic. Which really surprised me because I would have thought direct traffic would be used to using that thing. They weren’t, they didn’t like it. They increased more than anyone. So that was interesting.
The other thing that was interesting, which I did not expect, was this generic brand search campaign on mobile. It went up by 443% in revenue. Now you can see there, the traffic… well it’s up 3%, but the cost, we’ve spent 40 bucks less and made an extra three grand. That’s pretty good.
So there’s little things like that. And I look at that one and say, “Well, it’s generic brand. Once again, they’re coming in on the homepage, not coming in on a product page. As opposed to the shopping ads, which didn’t really have any impact from this change that we did.” But the shopping ads, you directed to a product page. Quite often with a generic brand campaign, you’re going to land on the homepage. And that’s where this product filtering thing was.
So you never know sometimes, unless you comb through the data after you’ve made a change, what’s been impacted. Now, if I wasn’t looking after his ads, I would have made their ads guy just look awesome. So please, spare a thought. If you’ve split your SEO and your ads into different agencies, because they work together. And unless you are looking at both at the same time, or your agencies are working together too, to say, “Hey, look, this is probably going to help your ads. Just be aware of that.” Whatever. Like this did. I didn’t expect that. But hey, it’s a nice bonus.
Hopefully that’s helpful. Look through everything. Go to a shop next time. And when you’re in the store, think about what you’re doing and think about, what do I do on my e-commerce site? What’s the equivalent of that online e-commerce site?
And we’ll see you next week. Don’t forget to like, share, subscribe. And you know, obviously, tell your friends. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
