CXL Institute Conversion Optimization Mini-Degree Scholarship Program Week 8 Review

I left off last week’s blog post covering the ‘the importance of visual hierarchy’ module for the CRO best practices section of the Conversion Optimization Mini Degree training. This week, I will continue to go through more of the best practices modules starting with ‘internal search’ module.

If your website has over 20 products or pages, it might be useful to add a user search functionality. A good reason to have a search bar or some form of a search functionality on a website is that website visitors who perform a search typically convert better and spend more money than site visitors who do not use the search functionality on a website.

In a report displayed in the module, the Google Analytics measures and shows that site visits without search converted at only 3.74% while site visits with search converted at an astoundingly high 15.48%. This is NOT an outlier too as it has been found consistency across the board that website visits with search used have higher conversions than those without a search.

The discrepancy or difference in conversion rate may not be as drastic as the example presented, but on average, there is significant differences in conversion rate. This is due to to many reasons. Some of them may be that:

- People who know what they want don’t want to browse, and use search instead
- Some people just are searchers
- It’s just one of those things — nobody knows exactly.produ

Impulse buyers tend to browse more first, not knowing what they may want to buy until they see it. An example of this would be in clothing where someone may be searching for a pair of jeans and they know that they want a dark pair of jeans but do not know the exact style or appearance that they would like to buy the most out of the options they may have on jean company’s website or jeans category.

Some product categories may also be more suited to using or needing a search functionality to find what you want to buy than others. It all depends on the niche or industry or type of e-commerce store it is. An example of a product category that may find a search bar useful would be an e-commerce clothing retailer offering various styles of dresses. There are different colors and styles of dresses so a search bar would help a website visitor narrow down and browse through dresses that match the website visitor’s product criteria to buy.

So now we know that searchers convert better. But how many people search? Say only 5.22% of people search. What if we could increase the percentage of people using the search function to 7.5% of site visitors? Or 10% or more? In the case of 10%, we would be effectively adding a substantial amount of revenue each month and annually. It is a goal worth pursuing.

One way to pursue this goal is to make the search box bigger.

The first step is to assess the search bar location and size. We want for the search bar to be in the top right corner or the top central of the site page, and we want this to be BIG. Not small. Big enough to catch the eye.

Site visitors often move fast when they are looking for search. They usually do this by scanning the home page for “the little box where I can type”. Make sure that the search bar is a type in function and not a link that has to be clicked on. A great example of s earth bar that follows these CRO principles is Amazon.com . Their search bar is at the top central of the page and above the fold at all times (even on their smartphone mobile app). It is big, easily noticeable, and visible to the eye.

Likewise, it helps to have product images in the site search window to boost conversions.

Questions to consider for optimizing the search function are:

- Does your search do auto-complete?

- Does it find stuff even if search queries have typos?

- Does it avoid the dreaded “no results found”?

Moving on, once site visitors get past the search functionality and manage to find a product they would like to buy, they add it to their shopping cart. After continuing to checkout, they now reach the shopping cart page.

We will now briefly cover the shopping cart pages module.

If people can buy more than one unique product from your website, you likely have shopping cart page. Just because someone has added your product to their cart does not mean that you can neglect the shopping cart page. This is a critically important page that affects conversion rates.The closer to the money we get in the sales funnel, the bigger the potential of impact each successive page will have on this process.

As soon as people add their first item to the cart, they’re not browsing anymore — they’re shopping.

When people add something to the cart on your product page, what should happen?

Most importantly: it should be obvious that they added something to the cart. Clear confirmation. It’s ridiculous how many sites screw this up either by not displaying a proper confirmation or showing a tiny animation, or small confirmation text that is hard to notice.

Now that they have added a product to their cart, we want to move them closer to completing their purchase. Here are two approaches to consider for what they should do next:

1. Show ‘cart add’ confirmation and remain on the same page. Pros: people didn’t ask to move to another page, so there are no surprises and thus good experiences. They might also consider adding more items to the cart before checking out. Cons: they already have the product they’re now staring at in the cart. It would be way more useful to you if they’d look at something else they might want to buy!

2. Transfer the user onto the cart page. The advantage here is that you’re taking them one step closer to making a payment. This is also a great opportunity to upsell. Cons: you might be losing out on “items per cart”.

The best strategy and approach for your specific situation depends on your industry and strategy. This is something to test.

Metrics to keep in mind here are :

- Average transaction value
- Average quantity per transaction

We don’t want to just increase the number of transactions, but also the amount spent for each transaction.

These are just a few things to consider for having. search functionality on site and also the shopping cart page. I will continue next week by finishing the shopping cart module and the final module of the best practices course within this training.

-David