3 Tips to Bring in the Most Online Revenue in 2017

To prepare for the $500 billion online shopping boom that’s predicted to gain massive momentum in the next few years, brands must heighten their focus on preparing and optimizing their online businesses in order to reach and exceed revenue goals.

Here are three tips to help all brands convert more revenue via their online stores in 2017:

Remove the Noise
“Noise” includes all distractions on a page that prevent a user from easily making a purchase. For example, banners that promote an upcoming event or ask users to sign up for an e-newsletter are merely obstacles to completing a purchase. There's a time and place for adding such information, but during peak shopping times and product launches, it becomes a roadblock to converting sales. Identifying online barriers and optimizing the organization of a page leads to user-friendly navigation and higher converting, ready-to-buy customers.

Know What Motivates Your Customers, Not Only What They’re Buying
To understand your customers, you must look beyond general demographics such as gender, age, location and household income. What’s more important is understanding why the user on your online or mobile site is behaving in a particular way, and what's motivating those behaviors. By analyzing users’ website journeys and click and touch patterns through real-time analytics tools that look at in-page data, you can identify the type of online customers you have and use this data to personalize browsing paths and ensure user retention. Understanding your customer beyond demographics leads to more optimal content and website organization, which in turn makes a happier customer who’s more willing to follow the path to purchase.

Prioritize KPIs That Matter
Big data creates an environment of endless tracking possibilities. Unfortunately, that puts brands into information overload and often aimless at prioritizing key performance indicators (KPIs). There are four user experience (UX) KPIs you need to track, but likely aren’t: click repetition, activity rate, time before click, and engagement rate. Measuring e-commerce performance through conversion rates, bounce rates, session duration and number of page views is also important, however, these four KPIs you’re likely not tracking are too easily ignored — and crucial to success:

• Click repetition is the number of clicks repeated on the same page element. A high-click repetition indicates user frustration. Click repetition can be caused from site design misunderstandings, bugs or an unclear call to action (CTA).
• Activity rate measures the time a user spends interacting with a page. Tracking this provides more insight on bounce rates because when a page fails to meet the needs of its visitors, they typically leave. Taking a look at how much a user interacts within a page indicates if a bounce is due to inadequate content (low activity rate) or interaction problems (high activity rate).
• Time before click can help improve and accelerate performance on the checkout page. It’s critical to identify and understand what’s unclear for those taking more time in the checkout process.
• Engagement rate indicates if you're creating efficient CTA buttons. You’ll learn what’s most appealing to your users. This allows you to optimize and reorganize your menus and CTAs for better performance.

By removing the noise, understanding what motivates each buyer and diversifying tracked KPIs, you’re improving online UX while growing the probability of purchase, leading to increased conversion rates and revenue.

Jonathan Cherki is the CEO and founder of ContentSquare, an experience optimization platform for online and mobile businesses.