How We Optimize a Homepage Based How Customers Shop
(28% Increase)

Published 3/28/2020

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Designing a homepage can be difficult to do, especially if you’re doing it for someone who may not know exactly what they want.

Described below are techniques or ways to change the layout and design a new page based on customer data.

Prereq: Below we will be using Google Analytics. However, you should be able get the same data from most major analytic tools. Additionally we are using a site with more than 40k monthly visitors.

Identify How Customers Shop Your Site

Research

First thing we do is to login to Google Analytics, Select your site if not already selected. Then on the left hand side menu, navigate to “Behavior > Behavior Flow“. It will look the same as the graph above.

This chart shows all the URLs of each page customers visit, their page depth, and where they leave the site.

To see all the traffic flow through the homepage, click on the green block with the “/” trailing slash. A pop up should appear next to the cursor. Choose “Explore Traffic Through Here”.

More often than not, the next page from home would be a category page, which customers use to further search for products.

Hovering over each path and you’ll see the Through Traffic and drop offs. These numbers are important as they can tell you if a customer found what they wanted or not.

Method Part 1

Using the techniques above, we identified customers were landing on the homepage, clicking to a few certain popular categories, and then the majority would select a subcategory option.

After setting up a Google Tag, further investigation showed us that visitors were using the layered navigation (shop by filter) on said category page.

Taking that most shoppers prefer to be fed with a silver spoon, rather than find it themselves, we needed to remedy and implement.

Method Part 2

The path of least resistance

Since we’ve found a large amount of customers were navigating to subcategory and/or filter, allowing the customer to skip a step could be beneficial to the page conversion rate.

So in this particular case we added the subcategories as banner grids on the homepage. This way the customer can visit the homepage and immediately resonate by finding more so what they are looking for, rather than having to search for it.

Result

30 days after we implemented this technique we increased the page value 28%!

Page Value Increase

0 %

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Case study

How We Optimize a Homepage Based How Customers Shop(28% Increase)