DEV Community: Laravel_Ecommerce

How to Find and Plug the Leaks in Your Conversion Funnels

Laravel_Ecommerce — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 10:52:43 +0000

Most of the e-commerce businesses loses their potential customers in the stages of the conversion funnel. As leaks were the reasons that hold most of the revenue loss, so it's essential to identity and patch the leaks. In this blog, you will learn how to find the leaks and how to fix them.

How to detect the leaks in your conversion funnels

You can find the conversion funnel leaks using three funnel-related reports in Google Analytics, let’s discuss in detail here,

Funnel visualization report (Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualization). This is the most common funnel report, which showcases the visuals of your funnel based on your selected goal.

Goal flow report (Conversions > Goals > Goal Flow). This report is helpful to find the conversion path. Also, it’s flexible when compared to funnel visualization as it allows people to use advanced segments and comparison of data.
Reverse goal path report (Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path). This report showcases the actual funnel. You will also find the funnels which you’re not aware of here, and the three pages visited before conversion happened.

While reviewing these reports, ensure to analyze where most of the visitors are exiting from the funnel. For improving your conversion, these are the leaks that much needed to be fixed. By doing this, you are more likely to improve your conversion rate. All you need to do is, find ways to plug those leaks and keep your visitors engaged in the funnel.

How to conduct quantitative research

Quantitative research is very numerical and objective-oriented, as it helps to uncover the reasons behind your customer’s and visitor's behavior. In the conversion rate optimization process, quantitative research mostly falls under any of the categories:

1. Technical analysis

If you start analyzing from the basic step, you can’t convert more when your store is already lacking behind.The ecommerce website design plays an important role You may think that most of the users are using the latest version of IOS or browser, but the actual truth is different. As your customers may have iPhone X or even Motorola Razr.
Technical analysis is related to various types of buyers and visitors, majorly this covers three core concepts in general.

Cross-browser and cross-device testing

This process helps you to determine whether your store works well across all browsers and mobile devices. As every browser and device has a lot of version updates, people generally don’t prefer these update reminders. Therefore, don’t imagine that everyone will have the latest version possible.
For this, you can make use of the BrowserStack tool, or any of the analytics tools of your preferences to validate these processes. For example, using Google Analytics, you can find these two major reports as follows,

Audience > Technology > Browser & OS AND Audience > Mobile > Devices.
You can easily analyze how well you get conversions by comparing browsers and devices with one another by switching the “Data” to “Comparison” view.
Make sure that you compare in between the same technologies such as Android to Android, IOS to IOS and Chrome to Chrome, etc.

Mobile optimization

Mobile optimization is important to provide a seamless experience for users. As the mobile screen is smaller than the desktop, user's needs and wants differ across these platforms. The intention, context, and motivation are quite different between mobile and desktop. Therefore mobile optimization is the key to providing a better experience in mobile.

Page speed optimization

Google reports, mobile landing pages take 22 seconds to load completely, but 53% of mobile users exit from pages that take more than 3 seconds to load. Moreover, if your website takes more time to load, visitors are more likely to leave your page. Hence, you will not get the opportunity to market your product or services to them. By using Google Analytics, you can choose the Behavior > Site Speed > Page Timings for identifying slow loading pages. You can run these pages via PageSpeed Insights to find better ways for improving your page loading speed.

2. Deep into Analytics

You can rest assured that everything is configured properly, by using analytics and shoplift reports. But if you use tools like Google Analytics, you need to follow a few steps while configuring yourself. Before diving deep into your analytics, ensure to ask yourself these questions:

Am I collecting all the required data?
Can I trust the data I have collected?
Are you aware if anything is broken or tracking incorrectly?

All your decisions may lead to useless if your analytics data is either incorrect or incomplete. Make sure you understand the data better and keep analyzing it for tracking your visitors and customers.

3. Form analytics

Consider the forms you have on your site as an important conversion factor. Whether it’s a simple lead generation form or contact form, make sure you consider it. These forms work as a medium for communication between you and your visitor or customer. So, you could perform better, when you have proper knowledge of interaction and friction regarding it.
The form analytics tools such as Formisimo can help you to find the answer to important questions, such as:
Which form brings the most frequent error messages?
Which form fields do your customers hesitate to fill?
Which fields do your customers leave empty, even if it’s necessary?

By analyzing these data, you can perform even better and improve your conversion rate as well as reduce the friction in meantime.

4.Heatmaps

Heatmaps are usually visual representations of data and here its values will be represented using colors. Generally, tools prefer using warm colors such as red, yellow, and orange to define high values. While representing low values it uses cool colors such as blue and green.

There are majorly two types of heatmaps in conversion rate optimization:

Clickmaps. The fact is, click maps are usually best to identify the places where your visitors tend to link out. However, clickmaps show data more useful than what the truth is at times. In simple words, you can make use of this analysis and link properly. These nonlinking elements can help visitors to direct links easily. This proves to offer a better user experience gradually.

Scrollmaps. Scrollmaps are a little bit more efficient. As it helps you to prioritize your messages in product pages and categories. You can keep your visitors scrolling by changing your visual clues from red to blue in your scrollmap. By doing this, you can move your messages to customers above the drop off point successfully.

Ecommerce: 12 reasons why your business needs SEO

Laravel_Ecommerce — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 06:40:56 +0000

SEO plays an important part in increasing your website visibility. Here are 12 reasons why your business needs SEO

1. Good SEO adds to the organic search factor

For greater conversion rates it is inevitable that your website appears in the organic search results. Google owns about 75% of the search market while competitors like Yahoo, Bing, Baidu etc occupy the rest. A majority of internet users visit Google everyday to obtain information. Having a good presence in the search market will help to increase your brands visibility and through good SEO you can achieve exactly that

2.Build trust and credibility

Through SEO, a strong foundation for an efficient website is established. For search engines like Google many factors are taken into consideration while generating authority for your website like quality backlinks, a positive user trend, machine learning signals, optimization of on-page elements and content. But all these factors cannot be built overnight. Authority for a brand is built slowly and it takes a lot of patience, effort and commitment. Most importantly the brand should offer valuable products or services to its consumers.

3.Enhanced user experience

Google values the user experience a website provides and it has now become a major factor for a websites success. Quality SEO assures a website with an optimal user experience and adds to the organic ranking factor and visibility. Laravel E-commerce Software is a Euser-friendly SEO Compliant software for building a ecommerce store online

4.Local SEO for more conversions

With the rise in mobile users, local SEO has gained prominence for the success of small and medium sized businesses. Local SEO optimizes your digital platforms for a specific area so that customers can find you easily like particular towns, cities, states etc. Local SEO can be done by optimizing the brands website and content, local citations, backlinks and also the local listings in connection to the area and business operations a brand is involved in. The knowledge graph panel, Google My Business listing and the social media profiles of the brand should also be optimized. Equal emphasis should also be laid on user reviews on Google and other review sites like Yelp, based on the brands area of business

5.SEO influences the buying cycle

Before buying any product customers do their research. Through SEO you can inform the target customers about exciting deals, useful products and services and when done in the right way will impact the buying pattern in a positive way. SEO can be used to establish a connect between the brand and customers by enhancing brand visibility

6.Constant updation

The world of SEO is constantly changing. New algorithms are introduced frequently and it is very important to stay updated so that your website does not fall behind in Google SERP(Search Engine Result Pages). Brands which stay updated are always benefitted

7.Through SEO you can know the world of web more closely

The worldwide web is always changing and it can be quite draining to be aware of the changes all the time. But by keeping an up to date track of SEO methods you can be in line with changes happening in the world of search

8.SEO is a very economical way

A brand can attain more, considering the investment it takes for a good SEO strategy. Good SEO implementation cannot be considered as a marketing cost but only as an investment for your brand in the long term.

9.A long term result provider

Within the first year of SEO implementations, results will start showing and this will last for several years even if you don’t follow and implement the trends and changes happening in the world of SEO to your brand. Basic SEO practices implemented on a decent website can bring in results in the long run.

10.SEO is quantifiable

With proper tracking and analysis you can easily understand where your brand stands now and how SEO best practices have helped in achieving this growth.

11.New opportunities through SEO

SEO that is high quality will provide brands ways to not only be discovered but to transcend all boundaries of marketing. Involving an SEO team into the brand is the best way to go about it. The better the SEO, more your brand thrives

12.You need SEO to be on page one

Nearly 40 percent of click-throughs come from the first three organic search ranking results which means that you need to be on page 1. When a user types a search query they need to find you. To establish these factors SEO is inevitable.

Conclusion

Good quality SEO is the best way to market your brand in this modern era. As competition is increasing with each passing day, a good web presence through quality SEO can keep your brand relevant and happening!

PWA vs Native mobile app for eCommerce

Laravel_Ecommerce — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 12:41:07 +0000

By 2020, the number of smartphone users worldwide will reach 2.87 billion. Therefore it is evident that mobile apps and Progressive Web Apps (PWA’s) will have a significant role to play in the world of eCommerce.

To choose wisely between the two, we have put together some facts that will help you take your business forward in the most profitable way!

What is progressive web apps?

The need to download from a play store is absent in the case of PWA as it works on a browser and this is the main difference between a PWA and a native mobile app.

Progressive web apps and their advantages

The main advantage of a PWA over a native mobile app is the ability to work without a playstore as it requires just a browser and therefore contributes in saving the storage space of mobile users.
Even if you are in offline mode, the PWA can work keeping the customers always connected with your eCommerce store
Easy to find for customers due to good optimization. The PWA’s possess URL’s which are indexed by Google and contributes to more reach
When compared to native apps, the PWA’s are easier, faster and cheaper to develop. The development of a native app for different platforms require particular technologies whereas in the building of a PWA the needed software are HTML, CSS and JavaScript for a mobile app development company

Disadvantages

PWA’s lack of access to calendars, contacts, browser bookmarks, alarms and also its inability to impede SMS or calls and also to obtain a users phone number contributes to its lack of functionality. This is due to the fact that it is a half app
Inability to access Bluetooth and sharing
In the US 51% of market share is taken up by the browser Safari. PWA does not operate on all web browsers and also on Safari and therefore there is chances of losing a large chunk of your audience
The PWA does not support the iOS customers ideally as it sends push notifications only to android users which can mean losing a large amount of business from iPhone users.

What is native mobile apps?

Native mobile apps are developed to operate simultaneously on Android and iOS platforms. There is more functionality to native apps. To use native mobile apps for eCommerce a mobile phone user has to download it from an app store.

Native apps and its advantages

Performance that is top notch. It is because of the fact that in smartphones the native apps are installed directly which gives the software, ability to gauge the device processing speed and function accordingly and the app functions faster since it is already present in the device
A great user experience as it has to comply with the Apple’s Human Design Guidelines to be listed in the App Store
Easily integrate with external service like an authorization through Facebook or shipping via FedEx
Easily customizable providing the opportunity for store owners to add special features while they develop mobile app for eCommerce business 5.Ability to utilize core operating system features like Geofencing unlike PWA’s. It leads to better communication as push notification will be send to users when the user reaches a location

Disadvantages

The need to download it from an app store adds that small element of inconvenience to customers who shop online when compared to a PWA.
Higher cost of development when compared to PWA

Conclusion

Even though the cost and time involved in development is higher, for better reach and customer satisfaction native mobile app for eCommerce will be ideal for your business. Also, your eCommerce business will have more conversions once you start using a native app as it provides a personalized, excellent user experience and also best performance. All these advantages will surely contribute in meeting the demands that potential customers have from your online store and contribute seamlessly towards a growing eCommerce business proposition.