Product Page Optimization through Analytics

Introduction:

With the proliferation of e-commerce sites available for a customer’s purchasing pleasure, it is crucial that your site – and most importantly, your product pages – are optimized to attract customers and encourage their ongoing engagement with your site. However, when it comes to e-commerce page optimization, every site’s product pages can differ and what works for one site may not work for all. So, how do you find out what is working – and perhaps not working – for optimized customer engagement across your product pages?

Analysis Overview

As product pages can be multi-dimensional, it is important to examine a couple of factors to better understand how – and how well – customers are interacting on your product pages. Specifically, in this analysis, we will take a look at two components to evaluate levels of customer engagement: tab engagement rates on product pages that have multiple tabs (i.e. overview tab, purchase tab, etc.) and click through rates (CTRs) by call to action (CTA) on product pages. We will then compare the data sets to begin to understand the interrelationship between different elements of customer engagement on product pages and to identify some best practices.

Analysis Benefits:

Achieve a better understanding of customer engagement across your product pages to help determine what content is most effective in engaging customers and how interested they are in your products and learning about your business.

Provide insight to identify the correlation between different elements of customer engagement on your product pages that can assist you with optimizing content to increase customer experiences and identifying best practices for engagement.

Analysis Formula

This customer experience analytics (CXA) formula will demonstrate how to build reports for basic page metrics that assist with insight into engagement and then apply advanced analytics to begin to highlight the correlation between the different elements of customer engagement.

This analysis is flexible and you should select the engagement metrics that are most applicable to your product pages, site and key performance indicators (KPIs.) So, while we have chosen to analyze engagements by tabs (for product pages comprised of different content tabs) and engagements through CTRS by CTA on product pages, you could easily choose to analyze other engagement metrics like duration of time spent on pages that have videos or downloads, for example, or bounce rates from pages. The important point is to select the key engagement metrics that will provide you the most insight into how customers are engaging on your specific product pages.

Step 1

As we will be evaluating engagement by reviewing a combination of page visits and CTA click through rates, we will need to create events that we can use for building various reports and for calculating metrics. For this analysis example, we will need to create events to record the page view counts for each of our product page tabs (i.e. overview tab, purchase tab, details tab, resources tab, etc.) So, we would create an event to record the “Overview tab view (count)” and another event to record the “Purchase tab view (count),” and so on. In addition, we will need to create events to record the page CTA counts for each of the product page tabs, such as an event to record the “Overview tab CTA (count),” and an event to record the “Purchase tab CTA (count),” etc. Again, the events to create will depend on those particular metrics you want to evaluate for your specific pages.

Step 2

With the applicable events created, we can now build reports to pin to our Workspace as widgets to give us different views of the engagement metrics. To begin to get a perspective of page visits, we will create a report and widget showing overall page views by product, as well as a separate report and widget to show the page views for the product pages broken down by tabs.

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To create a report, select “add widget” in the upper right of the Workspace area and click “create report widget.”
Select the metric you want to use to populate the report. (Metrics will appear organized into Tags.) For our example, to build a report to show the page views for the product pages broken down by tabs, we would select the following metrics: Overview tab view count, Purchase tab view count, Details tab view count and Resources tab view count.
Then, click “Generate chart,” and Report Builder is displayed. Report Builder is where you create all customized reports
To add dimensions or breakouts to your report, click “add” next to “Breakouts”. Select the preferred breakouts from the list (i.e. day and hour, conversion/abandonment, etc.) and then click “Breakout data by selected.” For our report on the page views for each tab of the product pages, for example, we can select “Day” for the breakout and our report will provide a day to day view of the data.
Select “Report options” in the upper right of the Workspace, and then select “Save as” and give the report a title and description. Then, select the Workspace (i.e. My Workspace, Shared Workspace, etc.) where you want this report widget to appear and then pin to a Workspace. Select the desired reporting period and adjust the report position as you would like it to appear on the Workspace.
After saved to a Workspace, you can select “Share” in the upper right of the Workspace to share the widget with others or export the report. To export or schedule a report, select “report options” in upper right and select either “export” or “schedule a report.”

Step 3

To compute the data for some of our reports, we need to create a calculated metric. For example, we can use the CTA counts for each tab and the view counts for each tab to calculate the CTA rate for each tab. Performing these calculations can assist with further analysis on our metrics and provide additional insight into our data.

To create a calculated metric, select “Build a new report” from the Workspace
Then, select “create” next to “Metrics” to display the “Calculated metrics” User Interface (UI.) The calculated metrics UI will look a bit like a calculator.
In order to perform calculations on data recorded by IBM Tealeaf, select the appropriate metric(s) from the tagged grouping of available metrics. (Metrics are really just saved events.) The selected metric(s) will highlight.
Next, select “generate chart” and the metric(s) are then added to the palette. Now, we can perform our calculation and then save and display the calculated metric. Again, following our example in this analysis, we would select “Overview tab CTA (count)” and “Overview tab view (count)” as our metrics on which to perform a calculation. Once selected and added to the palette, we would select the “Overview tab CTA (count)” metric to be divided by the “Overview tab view (count)” metric to provide us with the calculated “Overview page CTA rate.” Once all necessary metrics have been selected and the metrics calculated, you would save this calculated report and place it on your Workspace, just like your other reports.

Step 4

For this formula example, we will build several different reports to assist us in taking a look at CTRs by CTA, including Overall Page CTA Button Usage, CTA Clicks by Product, Overall CTA Click Thru Rate and CTA Click Thru Rate by Product, in addition to reports on page views by tab and page views by product (shown above.) Again, you will want to determine what engagement metrics make the most sense for your pages and associated business goals, and then generate the appropriate reports that will assist you in evaluating engagements across your particular product pages.

Sample CTA chart.png Sample CTA rate chart.png

Step 5

Then, to better evaluate the engagements across your pages, you will need to export sets of data from your reports and place side by side in tables to start to compare and analyze the various rates by product page in a single view. This consolidated view allows you to more easily identify high and low engagements and strong and weak click through rates -- and ultimately zero in on any best practices that can be identified in the analysis.

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Step 6

Moving beyond comparing exported sets of data in tables, we can even apply advanced analytic tools like Watson Analytics to generate additional views of our metrics and further understand the correlation between different elements of customer engagement. We will look to cover this in detail in a future CXA formula, so stay tuned!

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Customer engagement analysis can be a powerful tool in understanding if your product pages are optimized and if they are performing at their best. Building the right reports and comparing valuable data sets provides the insight needed to better understand what particular content is especially engaging customers on your product pages. Is there a video or other piece of content that is drawing a high – or perhaps low – interest on a tab or page? Is there a frequented page that customers visited without being driven by a CTA? What appears on a popular page that may have been of strong interest? Understanding what works – and what doesn’t – for engaging your customers with your product pages can allow you to take important steps to optimize your pages and better achieve your business objectives.

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Product Page Optimization through Analytics

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