You may be using familiar strategies to drive traffic and sales on your e-commerce website, but it’s always worth considering new ideas to improve performance.
This guide will explain some alternative metrics that can help you optimise and improve your e-commerce website.
Metrics for Optimising and Measuring Your E-Commerce Website Performance
1. Data Scraping from Breadcrumbs
Data scraping helps you to retrieve data for analysis. Breadcrumbs refers to the trail left by users as they navigate your website.
You can use crawling tools to scrape the breadcrumbs to build a fuller picture of your site.
Use XPath to create a separate field for the resulting data.
2. Segmenting Your Website
Larger e-commerce sites can have a vast number of product and category pages. A crawler will find it almost impossible to crawl your entire site, so segmenting allows you to focus on individual areas.
Your product pages are an excellent place to start since they generate the most revenue.
You can segment by URL patterns or stock status. The latter can identify how much traffic ends up on out-of-stock items.
From this, you will find out whether your out-of-stock products affect conversion rates.
Category pages can be segmented to build subcategories where you have hundreds of products.
Look for URLs that contain /category/or/shop/. You may also find other unique attributes to enable sorting.
3. Structured Data Markup
It is worth gaining an understanding of product markup through the use of product schema.
Product markup will provide extra information about your products that feeds directly into SERPS. It can deliver richer results through images and non-text elements.
Adding product schema provides your audience with valuable information on your products directly from the search page. It should encourage clicks and drive traffic to your products.
4. Utilise your Reviews
Positive reviews are very attractive to consumers. It is worth extracting the star ratings using third-party tools such as Trustpilot or Reevoo.
Obviously, when your audience sees a high rating on products in search, they are far more likely to click through.
5. Manage Your Crawl Budget
By managing your crawl budget, you can direct Google toward your most valuable pages, such as your products.
One way to do this is to disallow some pages from being indexed. If you don’t do this, then Google may opt not to crawl essential pages due to volume.
Think carefully about the content you do not need Google to index ,but ensure you do not exclude valuable content, such as locations, product sizes, etc.
6. Test your Site Speed Across All Page Templates
When you test pages to estimate your site speed, it is worth remembering that different kinds of pages will load at different rates. You likely use a template for the different types of pages.
When testing speed, include a few pages from each template to get a more accurate picture.
You can get valuable insights for your templates from PageSpeed Insights. Don’t forget to test away from your data centre to get a clearer picture of what your customers experience.
Test at least three times to allow for caching and test on mobile devices and desktops.
7. Improve your UX
User experience is a critical factor in the success of your e-commerce website.
Site Navigation
- You need your site to feature easy navigation with clear menus and pathways for customers. Having too many stages in their search will make them frustrated and click away.
- The architecture of your site matters. The best sites have a homepage, categories, subcategories and finally, the products.
- Sometimes as your business grows, you may be tempted to add layers that unintentionally confuse or delay customers. Remember to keep the structure simple.
Optimised Product Pages
Your product pages must be accessible and enticing, so ensure your PIM (product information system) works.
- You will need an introduction of 50-100 words that appeals to your customers.
- Bullet points are best for key information.
- Include a separate detailed product description that contains all the relevant information.
- Add user-generated content such as reviews, links to Instagram Photos etc.
- End with a summary and CTA.
Include a FAQ Section
Customers often have questions about delivery, quality, sizing, returns etc. They will go elsewhere if they cannot find the answer on your site.
Review Out-of-Stock Products
Products often go out of stock due to seasonal availability, limited releases or waiting on delivery.
While you may expect to find some out-of-stock products, customers will get frustrated and leave your site if there are too many.
Not only will this reduce sales, but it will also impact your SEO as many of your product pages become unuseful.
If you want help to improve your website and make it a destination for visitors to discover your brand and make purchases easily, get in touch with our experts at SEO and Web.
