eCommerce South West – Just a few of our key takeaways

This year’s eCommerce South West event ticked a lot of boxes: neat setup and venue (Paintworks, always a good choice), prime lineup of speakers and this all came for free.

Very proud that we got to be a part of it as sponsors.

Here our eCommerce Recruitment team’s highlights and key takeaways, just to point out a few:
5 things UX testing can do that Analytics can’t, Barend Faber (by Kat)

• Starting point here was the importance of understanding the behaviour of your customer, beyond Google Analytics.
• Google Analytics is a great tool to gather information about why you are losing customers during their online experience, but knowing exactly ‘why’ is much more powerful and will help you fix the problems quickly and more efficiently with better results.
• Watching ‘user videos’ and understanding how they react to branding, can be a quick way to see anything that is not working or putting your customers off, resulting in them leaving the site.
• You need to look at your business from a customer’s perspective (which is different to your own and your business’) – so focusing on customers needs is vital.
• Research your competitors. Not only should you run user testing on your own site, you should also test their sites and compare them against each other and your own.
• You can never test enough. Test and then test again for existing and new customers. Ensure to meet their needs, not only your own.

Finding weaknesses and increasing sales, Paul Randall (by Joe)

• With respect to Conversion Rate Optimisation, there are so many ‘get rich quick’ schemes out there, but when these sound too good to be true they usually are! You should find an approach using insights based on your target audience. For example, pop ups that come up as soon as you enter a site are massively off-putting, and Google has recently started penalising those that use them. This won’t help your organic rankings.
• It’s key to improve the usability with the customer in mind first and foremost, which in turn will improve conversions. To help generate ideas, you can think about what the goals of the business are, such as form submissions and downloads. Things like traffic do matter, but without the right usability first off, this figure will be irrelevant. This alone won’t help maximise usability, so bring in secondary goals such as type of content, product ratings and search functions. If watching a video will dramatically increase sales, then why wouldn’t you put it on there?
• There was a great quote in the presentation which I felt was applicable to all aspects of business, but in particular eCommerce. “Creativity is the last legal unfair advantage over the competition” (Dave Trott). One of the best examples I saw on the presentation was from ao.com. When you copy and paste a product code, it keeps you on the page by showing a comparison with other retailers. Knowing that they offer the product at the lowest price, helps the user and eliminates the need for them to check themselves – which would involve navigating away from the page they are on.

Innovation and Insights in PPC, Tom Sangers (by Gabby)

• It’s tempting to see the ‘Golden Days’ of Search as a thing of the past but, especially when it comes to paid search, it would seem that the best is yet to come. Digital spend is currently the largest channel in terms of where global advertising budget is spent at 43%. Not just that, but this is growing by around 14% per year!
• From a more local perspective, the UK will be the first country in the world where digital advertising spend represents half of all money spent on advertising.
• It was interesting to inspect the CPA variations across devices – tablet being the most expensive, mobile second most expensive and desktop being the cheapest by a significant margin. Things aren’t quite as simple as that though when consideration is paid to an attribution model beyond first / last click and many people will take a multi-device journey on route to purchase.

Mobile SEO Tips You Can’t Afford to Miss, Lukasz Zelezny (by Gabby)

• The opening takeaway from a talk on Mobile SEO was that there is no such thing as Mobile SEO. SEO is SEO, regardless of the device that your users are accessing your site through.
• It was interesting to hear about the fact that, for some high-ranking businesses at least, ‘Page 1’ of Google isn’t necessarily the holy grail any more and that we’re now seeing brands positioning their content to vie to be positioned in the Google Answer Box. It was also great to hear just how vital a part content plays in this selection process – forming the majority of the criteria for this selection.

Should you’ve missed the event, we’ve gathered a few pieces of wisdom from event speakers Aran, Lukasz and Paul ahead of their talks about their areas of expertise:
Paul Randall: Do you really know how your visitors are using your website?

Aran Reeks: The future of eCommerce – are you prepared?

Lukasz Zelezny: SEO for eCommerce – how to get it right