Rolling out SnowBlowersDirect.com in plenty of time for the snow season, multiple site e-retailer Power Equipment Direct Inc. uses its web analytics tool to tweak page layouts to get the best conversion rates, company founder Jon Hoch tells InternetRetailer.com.
SnowBlowersDirect, which launched this week, joins a stable of Power Equipment Direct web sites including AirCompressorsDirect.com, ElectricGeneratorsDirect.com, and PressureWashersDirect.com.
But the retailer won’t fully promote the new snowblowers site until testing its page layouts for a week or so with web analytics from ClickTracks, a unit of J.L. Halsey. “ClickTracks lets us identify shoppers’ traffic patterns,” Hoch says. “If we see that no one’s clicking on something, we either change the treatment or get rid of it.”
The ClickTracks web analytics application displays analytics data overlaid on a web page, showing, for example, the percentage of page clicks that go to each link on a page. It also shows the percentage of clicks that each link receives from shoppers who have a made a purchase on the site.
On ElectricGeneratorsDirect.com, for example, Hoch discovered through analytics that a lot of visitors clicked the first page of its buyer’s guide section, where they can learn product and operating details about items like a standby power generator. “We pride ourselves with our buyer’s guides, and people who read through them are more likely to buy than those who don’t read them,” Hoch says.
But analytics also showed that many visitors who clicked the first page of a buyer’s guide didn’t click to a second page, resulting in lower visitor-to-buyer conversion rates. Hoch fixed the problem by more clearly marking a more descriptive “next” link that told what was on the next page, and by prominently indicating that the first buyer’s guide page was the first of five pages.
“At first we couldn’t understand why people weren’t clicking through our buyer’s guides,” Hoch says. “But now they are and conversions are way up.”
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