With Other Sites Converting No Higher Than 10%. Are You Leaving Money On The Table?
Imagine yourself walking into your local supermarket with your child in tow. Your goal is to simply pick up a gallon of milk. Despite being a popular item, the milk is located in the back of the store, taking you right by the donuts—which sound pretty good so you pick some up (sure, it’s 7pm, but who’s going to know?). You cut through the cereal aisle, where the sugary cereals with cartoon characters on the boxes are on the 2nd shelf from the bottom, directly in your child’s line of sight. In the cart a box goes. On your way out, you wait few minutes at the checkout counter, surrounded by candy and magazines. After a couple minutes, a pack of gum suddenly seems like a good idea and your child wants a candy bar, so you toss those on the counter.
What just happened?
Just like supermarkets use subtle tactics and triggers such as store layout, music, end cap displays and discount price tags to get you to buy more and—more importantly—buy more often, your website can accomplish the same thing.
Everything from the benefit statement on your landing page to where you place the “Add to Cart” button on your ecommerce site can have drastic effects on your total sales. However, you won’t know where these subtle changes should be made without testing different layouts, copy and a number of other factors.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) implies we’re only focused on getting more of your existing users to convert (besides, you can increase your conversion rate and still experience a decrease in sales). Sales optimization, on the other hand, focuses on the metrics that have a more correlated and greater impact on your bottom line. Those metrics are:
With both of these metrics as a top priority, we can ensure time is spent getting users to buy more and buy more often. More sales at a greater value is much more definitive than simply getting more of your users to simply buy something.
On Tuesday, your site once again received 1,000 visitors, of which 10 checked out with a single product worth $15 and 2 checked out with 2 products each worth $20.
In this example, your site recorded a 2% (20/1,000) conversion rate on Monday, bringing in $200 (20*10) in sales. On Tuesday, your conversion rate was just 1.2% (12/1,000), however you brought in $230 in sales ((10*15)+(2*2*20)).
If your focus was on conversion rate only, you would consider Monday to be more successful, and would optimize the site to build off of Monday’s results. With sales optimization, we focus on what happened on Tuesday—getting users to increase their order size and make more than one purchase.