Analyzing Ecommerce Website Traffic

A client came to us frustrated. They had thousands of website visitors per day, yet their sales were flat. No matter how much they spent on ads or SEO, the revenue just wasn’t growing. The problem? Traffic isn’t the goal - conversions are. After diving into their analytics, we found several hidden conversion killers: A complicated checkout process – Too many steps and unnecessary fields were causing visitors to abandon their carts. Lack of trust signals – Customer reviews missing on cart page, unclear shipping and return policies, and missing security badges made potential buyers hesitate. Slow site speeds – A few-second delay was enough to make mobile users bounce before even seeing a product page. Weak calls to action – Generic "Buy Now" buttons weren’t compelling enough to drive action. Instead of just driving more traffic, we optimized their Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) strategy: ✔ Simplified the checkout process - fewer clicks, faster transactions. ✔ Improved customer testimonials and trust badges for credibility. ✔ Improved page load speeds, cutting bounce rates by 30%. ✔ Revamped CTAs with urgency and clear value propositions. The result? A 28% increase in sales - without spending a dollar more on traffic. More visitors don’t mean more revenue. Better user experience and conversion-focused strategies do. Does your ecommerce site have a traffic problem - or a conversion problem? #EcommerceGrowth #CRO #DigitalMarketing #ConversionOptimization #WebsiteOptimization #AbsoluteWeb

Are you generating enough value for users net of the value to your company? Business value can only be created when you create so much value for users, that you can “tax” that value and take some for yourself as a business. If you don’t create any value for your users, then you can’t create value for your business. Ed Biden explains how to solve this in this week's guest post: Whilst there are many ways to understand what your users will value, two techniques in particular are incredibly valuable, especially if you’re working on a tight timeframe: 1. Jobs To Be Done 2. Customer Journey Mapping 𝟭. 𝗝𝗼𝗯𝘀 𝗧𝗼 𝗕𝗲 𝗗𝗼𝗻𝗲 (𝗝𝗧𝗕𝗗) “People don’t simply buy products or services, they ‘hire’ them to make progress in specific circumstances.”  – Clayton Christensen The core JTBD concept is that rather than buying a product for its features, customers “hire” a product to get a job done for them … and will ”fire” it for a better solution just as quickly. In practice, JTBD provides a series of lenses for understanding what your customers want, what progress looks like, and what they’ll pay for. This is a powerful way of understanding your users, because their needs are stable and it forces you to think from a user-centric point of view. This allows you to think about more radical solutions, and really focus on where you’re creating value. To use Jobs To Be Done to understand your customers, think through five key steps: 1. Use case – what is the outcome that people want? 2. Alternatives – what solutions are people using now? 3. Progress – where are people blocked? What does a better solution look like? 4. Value Proposition – why would they use your product over the alternatives? 5. Price – what would a customer pay for progress against this problem? 𝟮. 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗝𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝗠𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 Customer journey mapping is an effective way to visualize your customer’s experience as they try to reach one of their goals. In basic terms, a customer journey map breaks the user journey down into steps, and then for each step describes what touchpoints the customer has with your product, and how this makes them feel. The touch points are any interaction that the customer has with your company as they go through this flow: • Website and app screens • Notifications and emails • Customer service calls • Account management / sales touch points • Physically interacting with goods (e.g. Amazon), services (e.g. Airbnb) or hardware (e.g. Lime) Users’ feelings can be visualized by noting down: • What they like or feel good about at this step • What they dislike, find frustrating or confusing at this step • How they feel overall By mapping the customer’s subjective experience to the nuts and bolts of what’s going on, and then laying this out in a visual way, you can easily see where you can have the most impact, and align stakeholders on the critical problems to solve.

Remarketing is often the misunderstood middle child of performance marketing. Let’s break a couple of myths🔨 🎯 One size fits all fits probably no one:  I’ve seen many companies burn money on campaigns that don’t recognize that every section of their audience has their own motivations. Why, if I had a penny for every time I visited a site with no intent to purchase their product at all, only to spot a “Schedule a Demo Today” ad by them on whichever site I visit, I’d probably be the richest guy in SaaS! I read somewhere that 84% of users either ignore or are put off by retargeting ads! Shows how important it is to get it right. Start doing these things: - Segment visitors by page depth (1 page vs 3+ pages) - Track time-on-site thresholds (>2 min = higher intent) - Create separate campaigns for pricing page visitors vs. blog readers Tailor your content based on your audience’s behavior and stage in the buyer journey (URL path visitors, action completers, cart abandoners) 🎯 Retargeting works like a mosquito coil:  Retargeting is not plug and play, and it typically doesn’t stop with one level. Retarget for all customer stages. Not only demo and trial signups. This insulates your prospects from leaving the funnel midway. We’ve had cases where we spent thousands of dollars on a retargeting campaign only to make zero sales. But here’s what happened afterward ⭐ : When we triggered another retargeting campaign for the warmer folks from the previous campaign, giving them BOFU content, we made sales. A lot of it! What’s to learn here? You’re unlikely to be bet on with just the first touch point. You have to build that awareness consistently. Create a 3-tier remarketing structure: > Tier 1 (Cold): Educational content, industry reports > Tier 2 (Warm): Case studies, comparison guides > Tier 3 (Hot): Free trials, demos, limited-time offers Build custom audiences for each segment, assign specific content types to each, and implement frequency caps based on ‘bucket temperature’. Also, the focus should also be on increasing the credibility of your company rather than only pushing them towards the CTA. Here's one customized Google + LinkedIn campaign strategy we used for a client recently. What are some retargeting tactics that’s worked for you?

Incrementality testing is crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of marketing campaigns because it helps marketers determine the true impact of their efforts. Without this testing, it's difficult to know whether observed changes in user behavior or sales were actually caused by the marketing campaign or if they would have occurred naturally. By measuring incrementality, marketers can attribute changes in key metrics directly to their campaign actions and optimize future strategies based on concrete data. In this blog written by the data scientist team from Expedia Group, a detailed guide is shared on how to measure marketing campaign incrementality through geo-testing. Geo-testing allows marketers to split regions into control and treatment groups to observe the true impact of a campaign. The guide breaks the process down into three main stages: - The first stage is pre-testing, where the team determines the appropriate geographical granularity—whether to use states, Designated Market Areas (DMAs), or zip codes. They then strategically select a subset of available regions and assign them to control and treatment groups. It's crucial to validate these selections using statistical tests to ensure that the regions are comparable and the split is sound. - The second stage is the test itself, where the marketing intervention is applied to the treatment group. During this phase, the team must closely monitor business performance, collect data, and address any issues that may arise.  - The third stage is post-test analysis. Rather than immediately measuring the campaign's lift, the team recommends waiting for a "cooldown" period to capture any delayed effects. This waiting period also allows for control and treatment groups to converge again, confirming that the campaign's impact has ended and ensuring the model hasn’t decayed. This structure helps calculate Incremental Return on Advertising spending, answering questions like “How do we measure the sales directly driven by our marketing efforts?” and “Where should we allocate future marketing spend?” The blog serves as a valuable reference for those looking for more technical insights, including software tools used in this process. #datascience #marketing #measurement #incrementality #analysis #experimentation – – –  Check out the "Snacks Weekly on Data Science" podcast and subscribe, where I explain in more detail the concepts discussed in this and future posts:    -- Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gKgaMvbh   -- Apple Podcast: https://lnkd.in/gj6aPBBY    -- Youtube: https://lnkd.in/gcwPeBmR https://lnkd.in/gWKzX8X2 

"Mother Mary," the engineer blurted out. "396 milliseconds." The room erupted. They'd just shattered the 400-millisecond barrier—what IBM researchers called the "Doherty threshold." Here's why it mattered: For 14 years, the computing world believed users needed 2 seconds of response time. The thinking? People needed time to process their next move. Dead wrong. In 1982, IBM discovered that when systems respond in under 400 milliseconds, something magical happens. Users stay glued. Their productivity soars. They enter a flow state that lasts for hours. Cross that threshold? Their minds wander. The spell breaks. The implications were staggering: ✓ Google found that a 500ms delay = 20% drop in searches ✓ Shopzilla increased revenue 12% by speeding up from 7 to 2 seconds ✓ Amazon calculated every 100ms of latency costs them 1% in sales But here's what's wild: This was discovered before the internet, before mobile, before AI, before we carried supercomputers in our pockets. Today? Users expect instant. Touch latency on tablets. Page loads on mobile. Every interaction is judged in milliseconds. The lesson: Speed isn't a luxury. It's the price of admission. Your users' attention is the scarcest resource in the world. Every millisecond you waste is a millisecond they might spend elsewhere. What's your product's response time?

❌ One mistake that will kill your business? Spending time or money on growth before mapping & measuring your customer journey. Most founders & marketers jump straight into paid ads, social media, and partnerships. But if you don’t understand how your customers move through your product, you’re burning money. 🛑 Growth WITHOUT a mapped journey = wasted effort. ✅ Growth WITH a mapped journey = compounding success. The most successful companies have done 3 things: 1️⃣ Defined their customer journey – from discovery to advocacy. 2️⃣ Optimized every touchpoint – reducing friction & increasing conversions. 3️⃣ Measured & iterated – identifying bottlenecks & doubling down on what works. Before you invest in traffic, ask yourself: 👉 Do I fully understand how my customers move through my product? 👉 Am I tracking & measuring every key step? 👉 Where are the bottlenecks—and how do I fix them? 💡 Your job as a founder or marketer is simple: 📌 Constantly improve the way customers interact with your product. 📌 Map every touchpoint before spending a dime on growth. 📌 Measure, optimize, repeat. This is Step 1 in every business I scale. And it works. 🚀 What’s YOUR biggest challenge in mapping the customer journey? Let’s discuss. 👇

The key to profits and sustainability in e-commerce is not landing new customers. It’s getting customers to come back again and again. Repeat purchase rate is the North Star every e-commerce business needs to follow. Those one-and-done customers might give you a short revenue spike. But repeat customers spend more over time, refer friends, and can make up over 40% of revenue. They are the lifeblood that separates temporary fads from lasting success stories. So, how do we turn new customers into lifelong loyalists? It starts with a mindset shift - from chasing endless new sales to creating lasting relationships. ☑️ Build trust by over-delivering on quality and service. ☑️ Seek genuine feedback and keep optimizing the customer experience.  ☑️ Surprise and delight with loyalty perks and early access to new arrivals. The brands that will still be around in 10 years know success isn't a single sale. It's thousands of small moments that make customers feel excited to come back for more.

For my eCommerce marketing / CMO / CDO friends out there i'm going to let you in on a little secret on how you can gain an edge on your competition... Make sure your site is performant and fast! Even a 1 second increase in load time can decrease conversions by 6% and increase abandonment by as much as 12%! I've seen brands invest in a new eCommerce tools and platforms only to see that they are losing money and their conversion is worse because it slowed their site down. It happens more often than you might think. Yet when Google surveyed eCommerce marketers they found: - 81% of marketers know speed impacts conversions, but don't prioritize optimization - Only 3% of marketers say faster load speed is their top priority Google also published stats on average retail site speed: - US Sites Average 6.3 Seconds - UK Sites Average 6 Seconds - DE Sites Average 5.6 Seconds - JP Sites Average 5.2 Seconds Modern tech stacks can get you to 3 seconds. This not only affects CVR% but also SEO ranking and so much more. If your store is your house then site speed is your foundation. Strengthen the foundation first! Are you faster than your competition or the average site in your locale? #UX #SiteSpeed #Performance #Ecommerce #CVR

This is the most important table in e-commerce—but no one ever talks about it and it's costing you MILLIONS. It's not a cap table. It's not an AOV table. It's the returning customer cohort table. It shows by month acquired, how much customers are worth on first order and each month thereafter. Why it's the most important thing in ecom: 1. True Customer Value Revealed A $50 first order may become $120 over 6 months. This changes everything - suddenly, that "expensive" acquisition cost is a bargain. Many brands have ROAS targets that are too high, they aren't accounting for 60-90D value. 2. Market Domination Justify higher CAC by looking at long-term value. If 90-day value is $200, you can afford $100 CAC while competitors cap at $50. Dominate your market. 3. Cohort Analysis Insights Discover which channels bring high-value customers. FB ads might cost more but deliver 3x lifetime value vs. Google. Optimize spend accordingly. 4. Cash Flow Management Predict payback periods accurately. If cohorts show 60-day breakeven, confidently reinvest every two months. Scale aggressively but safely. 5. Product Strategy Identify which products create loyal customers. If Product A has 70% retention vs 30% for B, prioritize A in marketing and development. 6. Forecasting Precision If cohorts consistently grow 20% monthly, project revenue 6-12 months out with confidence. Plan inventory, hiring, and expansion strategically. Master the cohort table to build a customer value engine that compounds over time. This is how category-defining brands are built. Not by having the highest ROAS.

Repeat business is where the real profitability lies in any business. Estimates show that selling to an existing customer is six times more profitable than acquiring a new one. This is why it’s essential to focus on the entire customer lifetime journey, which goes beyond the first transaction. The journey is not just a single interaction where a customer sees an ad, makes a purchase, and moves on. Instead, the relationship should be nurtured continuously. A welcome strategy after the first sale—such as thank you notes, helpful tips, and relevant offers—can create lasting connections. Studies show that repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers, and increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25% to 95%. Moreover, customers are more likely to remain loyal when they resonate with a company’s sense of purpose. Brands that effectively communicate their mission not only inspire loyalty but also develop deep emotional connections, increasing the lifetime value of each customer. Businesses that focus on these strategies can build long-lasting relationships that translate into continuous revenue streams. #CustomerRetention #LifetimeValue #BrandLoyalty #CustomerJourney #MarketingStrategy #BusinessGrowth #CustomerExperience #RepeatBusiness #CustomerSatisfaction #MissionDrivenMarketing