4 Steps to Optimize Your Ecommerce Store — Optimizing Product Lists (Part 3)

How to Use Product List Performance to Reorganize Your Website Layout

Image via The Economist.

If you own a physical retail store, you know that how you arrange your products matters. In fact, it matters a lot.

It’s why IKEA makes you walk through aisles and aisles of trendy furniture before you can exit the store. It’s also why they put the most tempting candy bars and treats near the register — because they know these are impulse buys.

If you own a grocery store, be careful where you put the milk. GIF via GIPHY.

That’s why there is a whole consulting industry focused just on what is called “product assortment.” Retail consulting firms like Kantar Retail have teams of analysts that do rigorous experiments and analyses to find the optimal arrangement of consumer packaged goods on supermarket shelves.

Retail consultancies often AB test different product arrangements using software tools. Image via Slideshare.

Well, selling products in an online ecommerce store is no different.

How you arrange products can have a huge impact on whether people buy, and how much they buy. This is as true for online ecommerce stores as it is for brick-and-mortar stores.

That’s where the fourth and final step comes in: Product List Optimization.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of our Ecommerce Analytics series, we covered the four steps of optimizing your ecommerce store with Google Analytics, which helps you learn how customers are interacting with your website:

1. Step 1: Shopping Behavior Analysis — First, take a look at your customers’ overall shopping behavior from landing page to product page to checkout.
2. Step 2: Checkout Behavior Analysis — Second, focus specifically on the checkout process.
3. Step 3: Testing — Third, use ecommerce segments to test your hypotheses for what’s driving the problems with your online shopping process.
4. Step 4: Product Performance Analysis — Product analysis lets you look at how products and product lists are performing, so you can optimize how they are arranged on your site layout.

Today we’ll walk you through the last part of Step 4: Product List Optimization. We’ll cover:

1. What are Product Lists?
2. 4 Steps of Product List Optimization
3. Next Steps

Let’s start with what product lists are, and what it means to optimize them.

What are Product Lists?

A product list is simply a way of organizing how products are presented to customers on your website.

In other words, a product list can be a block of promoted products on your homepage, a page with products of a certain category (e.g. men’s shirts), or search results from a customer searching a keyword in your website search bar.

Let’s take the Google Merchandise Store as a simple example. This ecommerce store sells Google-branded products and currently has three main product lists on its website.

The Category product list includes all the product pages sorted by category. For example, you can find products branded with “Youtube” under “Shop by Brand.”

The Search Results product list, on the other hand, includes the products that appeared in search results on the Google Merchandise store (e.g. all the products presented to me if I search “henley”).

Now that you know what product lists are, let’s analyze how they’re performing and optimize them!

4 Steps of Product List Optimization

Product List Optimization simply means optimizing your product lists to maximize product sales (thanks Captain Obvious).

I know what you’re probably thinking: so why do I care about product list performance?

In short, this analysis helps you identify which on-site product arrangements are most effective in getting customers to buy products.

Let’s go back to last week’s example: you’re the marketing director for an ecommerce company that sells outdoors camping gear. You’re reviewing your weekly Google Analytics reports, and notice that…

The main place to look is in Google Analytics is the Product List Performance report (Conversions > Ecommerce > Product List Performance). This ecommerce report lets you analyze which product blocks, category pages, and search results drove the most engagement and conversions for each product.

Specifically, for all your products, you can look at which product lists resulted in the most:

1. Views
2. Clicks
3. CTR (click-through rate — of all your views, how many users clicked through to the product)
4. Adds to cart
5. Checkouts
6. Purchases
7. Product revenue

There are 4 steps to analyzing product list performance — let’s start with Step 1!

Step 1: Identify and promote the top-performing product lists

By default, this report is sorted by Product List Views. Click on the header of the Product List CTR column to sort product lists by click-through rate. These are the product lists that you want to promote.

Step 2: Promote products that have a relatively high CTR despite having a relatively low product list position.

Compare the click-through rates (CTRs) for different Product List Positions. Positions are the order in which the products are displayed in your product blocks.

First isolate the Product List you’re interested in by typing in its name in the search bar. Then use Product List Position as a secondary dimension.

The top positions tend to have the highest CTR because they’re more visible to users.

If the CTR are scattered, it’s more likely they’re clicking on it because they’re interested in the actual product rather than just clicking the more visible products. Put these “MVPs” (most valuable products) at the top of the list. Moving those products to more prominent positions.

Step 3: Check values of Product List Clicks.

Try rotating other products into the Homepage Promo list in place of the worst performing product, to improve performance of this list. Or you can try moving them to a better position if they’re important.

Step 4: Look at how each product performs depending on what list it’s on.

Click All at the top, then change primary dimension to Product. Sort by Product List Clicks to see what products generate the most activity. Filter the table for the top performing product using the search bar.

Add product list name as a secondary dimension.

Then sort by Product List CTR to see which product list this product performs best.

As you can see, these placements work well.

These reports help you make tactical decisions about the organization and placement of products in product lists. But be mindful of where and when they appear on your site.

Don’t compare performance of product list of homepage to one that’s deep within your site. Cross promotions can often be improved by making them more prominent on your web pages. However, when you can’t change the placement (like in search results), you may have to adjust products instead .

Next Steps

Today, we showed you how your ecommerce business can learn how your product lists are performing. More importantly, we walked you through how to reorganize the arrangement of products on your website to maximize product sales.

Let’s briefly revisit our 4-step Ecommerce Analytics framework from last week’s post. Congratulations, you now know how to go through all 4 steps of ecommerce optimization, with just one free tool (Google Analytics)!

1. Step 1: Shopping Behavior Analysis — First, take a look at your customers’ overall shopping behavior from landing page to product page to checkout.
2. Step 2: Checkout Behavior Analysis — Second, you want to focus specifically on checkout behavior, because checkout is the key stage where users make their purchase, and they can run into friction points on their way to the final transaction.
3. Step 3: Testing — Third, test your hypotheses for what’s driving the problems with your online shopping process using ecommerce segments.
4. Step 4: Product Analysis — Lastly, you want to look at how products and product lists are performing, so you can optimize how they are arranged on your site layout (we’ll cover this next week).

After going through these steps, your online ecommerce store will be fully optimized to increase more product purchases. Like IKEA, you’ll have the power of choice architecture design working for you instead of against you as you improve the online shopping experience for your customers!

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