Finding the 15 most important pages on e-retail sites
Web real estate may be seemingly infinite, but shopper’s page views are anything but. “Online retailers really have a very limited amount of real estate to optimize for their buyers,” John Mellor, vice president of marketing at web analytics provide Omniture Inc., tells Internet Retailer. In a study it commissioned of Jupiter Research Inc. of the 100 largest retailing sites, Omniture found that the average number of pages viewed on a site per visitor per month was fewer than 20 for more than 50% of sites studied, no matter how many pages the retailer put up on the site.
“The takeaway is that 56% of your traffic is going to intersect with your site through fewer than 20 pages over the course of a month. With three to five of them being checkout pages, you’re down to about 15 pages that you need to optimize so they make a purchase. So it becomes very important to understand which pages on your site are producing the most revenue,” Mellor says.
That means going beyond using analytics to determine the number of clicks on page links to using them to figure out revenue per click. Some online retailers who’ve done this analysis using Omniture analytics have discovered that individual product category pages have accounted for as much as 30% of the revenue on their site, Mellor notes. If that’s the case, those pages should get the lion’s share of the retailer’s site testing and optimization resources, he adds. “A 2% to 3% gain in efficiency is worth much more on that page than it is on a page that only participates in 5% of your site’s revenue,” he says.
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