On matters of a digital nature the luxury sector has come on leaps and bounds over the last few years. As consumers we’ve rejoiced at the bonfire of the vanity flash sites and we’ve given a Facebook thumbs up to the advance of luxury in the social web space.
And yet when it comes to eCommerce there are still some hang-ups and foibles that prevent brands from maximising the sales opportunity, and a recent dilemma posed to me by an SME specialising in luxury fragrance illustrates this issue succinctly.
The Problem
The problem was clear. A substantial investment in SEO had paid apparent dividends with the website doubling it’s natural search traffic over a 12 month period. However, during the same period the conversion rate had dropped by half. So despite a big increase in visits, the sales were flat year on year.
The bricks and mortar side of the business was experiencing double digit growth. Online something was clearly wrong.
All other factors were equal. The brand had not opened up any new marketing channels and the site was running off the same eCommerce platform that had previously yielded the higher rate of conversion.
In these types of situations, the analytics package is always the starting point. By simply looking at the user journeys by traffic source it was clear that the website was hemorrhaging visitors from natural search links. Bounce rates were upwards of 70% compared with an average of 30% site wide.
Brand specific terms were accounting for 80% of the search volume, all of which pointed to an old fashioned ‘gateway’ homepage who’s only function was to ask you what country you originated from.
And there’s the rub. The brand owners saw the gateway page as a useful departure page to their country of origin. The customers? Well, they saw it a reason to depart the site altogether.
Rather than ensuring that search results linked directly to the shop and the carefully planned promotions, the brand has assumed that all traffic was equal.
The Solution:
With peak trading approaching, there was no time to re-engineer the website so the solution was to be found in paid search. The advice was to set up sponsored search listings on Google on those same keywords that were causing a problem in natural search. The paid search ads would be directed to the shop page for each country thus by-passing the poorly designed homepage.
In some ways this was a damage limitation exercise. Paid search results do not perform as well as natural search listings where listings are present for both, but they can account for up to 30% of clicks from the page.
The Result:
In 6 weeks the site saw sales increase by 65% year on year of which 55% could be directly attributed to the new paid search links. From flat trading in the previous 46 weeks, the end of year figure jumped to 15% up.
For me this was a striking example of how insight can give you as much uplift as marketing. And if the brand had got it’s SEO strategy correct in the first place? Well what a year they could have had!
Conclusions:
- Use your analytics package more and use it better. A simple weekly reporting of sales and conversion by traffic source would have red-flagged this problem and sales would have improved in line with traffic growth
- TEST, TEST, TEST your landing pages. A/B or multivariate testing is not being deployed enough at the SME level. Partly this is down to resource and partly this is down to inflexible eCommerce platforms that do not easily allow for split testing.
- Incentivise your agency relationships. The job of you’re digital marketing agency is to generate valuable leads. In the example above the SEO company could point to a substantial increase in traffic as a result of it’s work.
- Ask questions of your eCommerce package. If your operating international pricing and delivery then at the very list ensure that the platform can identify location of origin from IP addresses
