A Data Driven Approach to eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization

If you run an eCommerce business, you know that there’s plenty to pay attention to. There’s SEO, Facebook advertising, social media posts, and email marketing - all of which are certainly valuable and require your attention.

However, when it comes to quickly increase your sales and profits, improving your conversion rate may be your best bet.

Let’s say that, for example, your store currently converts at 1%. If you get 5,000 visitors to your store every month, you’re generating 50 sales per month, in units.

However, if you were to slightly improve this metric from 1% to 2%, which is closer to the average conversion rate for an eCommerce store, then you’ve suddenly doubled your sales from 50 units per month to 100 units per month without having to increase your traffic.

So, how do you go about improving the conversion rate for your eCommerce store?

There are a number of factors that determine your conversion rate performance:

• Your Industry - The industry you’re in has a lot to do with how good your conversion rate is. The arts and crafts industry has a relatively high conversion rate at around 4%, while the baby and child industry converts at under 1%.
• Your Country - The U.S. and Germany have higher conversion rates at around 2%, while France, India, and Italy all hover around the 1% mark.
• Your Traffic Source - This is partly dependent on your industry, but overall, email and referral traffic converts the best with both being over 5%. Traffic from social media and paid ads is the worst at around 1%.
• Your User’s Device - Users are much more likely to convert from a desktop (3.9%) than they are from a smartphone (1.8%). Because of this, it may be worth investing more in acquiring desktop traffic than mobile traffic if you’re running paid ads.

With these points in mind, you can start to make moves to improve your store’s conversion rate. With the help of the data in the infographic below, you’ll be able to use conversion rate averages to benchmark your store’s performance. Segment your traffic, and if you’re performing below average for a particular segment, look for ways to improve.

Continue to experiment and measure the results of those experiments until you reach an above-average conversion rate. Don’t waste resources on improving something that isn’t broken, however. If your conversion rate is well above the average for your industry or traffic source, move on to something that’s more likely to generate sales for your store.