Top e-commerce teams use detailed CRO strategies and user engagement analysis to continually improve and boost sales. Even negative outcomes lead to valuable insights.
Robert Hufton
In this article, we speak with our e-commerce expert about key CRO processes and how they drive continuous optimisation. By leveraging UX and CRO techniques, we learn how e-commerce teams consistently improve conversion rates and enhance overall sales performance.
Conversion Rate Optimisation (commonly known as CRO) is a key focal point within E-commerce businesses, who strive to achieve effective problem solving for traffic volumes reaching the website. A structured process within the e-commerce team, whilst possessing a positive and patient mindset, has been instrumental in the growth of the business. A carefully mapped out CRO strategy and end-to-end user engagement analysis are often how the best e-commerce keep making improvements to generate higher sales.
Usually, negative outcomes also produce positive results. Remember the hypothesis and use UX to understand why
Ensure your experimentation build tool is both vital and user-friendly. Most large ecommerce organisations utilise testing platforms such as Kibo, formerly known as Monetate before its rebranding. This tool's accessibility extends beyond Developers, making it easy for the wider team to use. A/B and Multivariate test builds are straightforward with proper training, and it empowers non-Developers who want to learn more about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, provided they have guidance from a Developer.
In the Kibo platform, you can duplicate tests, offering an efficient way to achieve quick wins. The system supports experimentation on main content and landing pages, while also enabling personalisation programs within your CRO strategy.
Key team members play an integral role when putting pen to paper to explore ideation. The CRO Specialist, UX Designer and Developer resources discuss an initial idea before the CRO Specialist briefs a wireframe or design mock up with written content, outlining as much detail as possible to avoid as little back and forth, however this is always going to be inevitable to an extent. Project management platform Jira plays a vital part, as it contains a user friendly structure allowing fantastic cross team collaboration from the likes of Marketing, SEO and PPC teams. For smaller teams, you might prefer Trello, or Monday.com for example. Communication prior to brief builds allow the opportunity for any potential push back from the Developer, i.e. if something technically will not work or the idea needs slightly re-thinking. This is particularly important for cross device builds, as mobile has to of course be responsive.
This is where the user psychology for the ‘Know’ ‘Feel’ & ‘Do’ comes into play, in short, the ‘theory’ behind the reasoning for the experiment. Key hypothesis elements may consist of the following:
Performance measuring tools are essential for validating hypotheses in CRO, especially for e-commerce websites. Tools like Google Analytics provide critical insights into traffic sources, user behaviour, and conversion paths, helping to identify friction points in the user journey. Power BI enables teams to visualise complex data, track key metrics, and create custom dashboards for a deeper understanding of sales trends and user interaction across the site. Session Cam, with its session replay and heatmap features, allows teams to observe real user behaviour in real-time, helping to uncover usability issues and opportunities for optimisation.
For e-commerce, these tools are invaluable in making data-driven decisions that improve conversion rates, enhance user experiences, and ultimately increase revenue. By leveraging performance data, e-commerce teams can refine their hypothesis, run more targeted A/B or multivariate tests, and continuously optimise their site to meet changing customer needs.
The team dedicates time to thoroughly navigate the entire user journey, starting from the homepage, through landing pages and conversion funnels, and continuing post-conversion. This process helps identify site issues, friction points, and potential user frustrations. By assessing functional issues across various browsers and devices, the team ensures consistency in user experience. Additionally, insights from "non-issues" or areas where users experience no friction are incorporated into future optimisation plans, helping to enhance seamless user flows and build a more robust, frustration-free site experience.
Many internal teams wont hire external teams for CRO audits. But if resources internally are tight, hiring external teams is always good for experts without a full time commitment.
UX Best Practices are shaped by insights from various sources, including competitor analysis, key industry trends, and direct feedback from users. By studying competitors, businesses can identify effective design patterns and features that resonate with target audiences. Staying on top of key trends ensures the site remains modern and aligned with user expectations, whether through visual design, performance, or new interaction models.
Basic navigation improvements focus on simplifying the user experience, ensuring intuitive pathways, reducing clicks to key actions, and making content easily accessible across the site. Regularly refining navigation based on user behaviour data can drastically reduce friction.
User surveys and user testing are invaluable resources for gathering qualitative feedback. Surveys provide direct insights into pain points or desired features, while user testing allows teams to observe real users interact with the site. Together, these resources guide practical UX enhancements, ensuring the design not only meets business objectives but also delivers an optimised, user-centered experience.
Experiment wins are shared with stakeholders to create opportunities for scaling successful strategies across the business’s smaller brands. This approach ensures that each brand benefits from proven design and layout improvements while still catering to their unique needs. Using Kibo, successful experiments can be easily duplicated and customised for different brands, provided the code remains compatible with the other platforms within the tool.
By replicating winning experiments, the business can quickly roll out optimisations that enhance user experience and conversions without starting from scratch for each brand. The ability to tweak and tailor these experiments allows flexibility to meet the specific design aesthetics and functional requirements of smaller brands, maximising the impact of CRO efforts across the entire business. This process not only saves time but also ensures consistency in delivering high-quality user experiences across all brand platforms.
This type of experiment is typically prioritised because subtle changes often require minimal effort yet have the potential for significant impact. Small adjustments—such as tweaking button colours, adjusting copy, or refining layout elements—can yield measurable improvements in user experience and conversions without demanding extensive development resources.
These quick-win optimisations are strategically planned to fit around larger projects on the roadmap, ensuring they don't interfere with other live experiments or ongoing initiatives. By integrating these smaller, less complex changes alongside more extensive efforts, the team can maintain momentum and continuously improve site performance while still adhering to the broader CRO strategy. This approach allows for ongoing refinement, enabling quicker turnarounds and delivering incremental value without overburdening the development pipeline.
All proposed ideas including conversations with key stakeholders and key team members involved in the experimentation process are migrated into an Experiment Roadmap containing priority numbering, depending on the hypothesis behind the launch plan. Key team members have full visibility to track launch statuses. This document contains various elements including:
Once briefs from the CRO Specialist are complete for the UX Designer, the Developer is looped into the Jira board so communication is fully available. Once designs have been completed, approved and tweaked where necessary, the Developer is briefed separately within Jira containing the attached design mockups. Clear instructions and communication at this point is essential to avoid eating into valuable time and resources pre launch date.
Project management platform Trello is the go-to tool for the internal (Troubleshooting) Test Team for all brands. Completed builds are labelled in Kibo with ‘QA’ in front the experiment name across all devices and these are linked to the brief in Trello with the visuals (or video if it’s more a functionality concept) to demonstrate the expected behaviour or visual of the experiment so the team know what to look for. Additional copy is included in the brief to ensure meticulous detailing during the QA process to further more ensure the most efficient time frames pre launch. The process troubleshoots the criteria:
Any ‘failed’ experiments as an outcome are communicated back and investigated by the Developer (CRO side) and resolved before being re-tested. Once the green light has been given from testing, it is almost ready for live launch.
This is nearing the home straight. A standard launch communication email template enables sharp contact with the wider relevant team to announce the imminent live launch plan. The relevance of this is to not only keep track of what is launching, but also useful for communicating results at a later stage, utilising the original thread to make efficient work.Detailing the following:
Daily monitoring is a given, the Power BI dashboard presents a quick access snippet of the nearest to ‘real time’ for performance. Despite experiments generally running for two weeks, there are occasions where they have to be paused, or positive data shared to the team midway, particularly for the higher profile changes. KPIs and performance expectationsConversion Rate is generally the ultimate incentive in experimentation, though other relevant measurable insights can include;
High session areas on site ie.the checkout funnels are influential in gathering the most out of experimentation analytics. It always remains vital to review the user journey in correlation to Power BI and a particular experiment, certainly if the experiment is further from the checkout, ie. a home page or listing page.
It is user friendly provides incredibly helpful insights, furthermore from an incremental perspective, ie. in simple terms, by switching an experiment live to 100% traffic, this will generate x amount per day
Lower session volume areas require additional tagging from the Developer to marry up to Google Analytics to ensure a more refined view of ‘x amount of customers’ clicked on this element, resulting in a ‘x%’ uplift of. Regardless, it is always excellent practice to utilise additional element tagging to achieve a more accurate reporting system.
Why do this?
It is vital that you measure KPIs to help with any optimisation. Otherwise decisions can be biassed by organisational powers rather than by sales data.
For completed or paused experiments, the original live launch template is recycled and badged as ‘Results for (name & ID)’ so email recipients can relate to what is being communicated. Again, this includes visuals / videos for clear referencing.
The protocol for successful experiments is a full switch to 100% of traffic view in Kibo whilst the hard code changes with the Developer for the e-commerce platform are in line to be actioned. This is the most efficient step to make the change fully visible, however additional website monitoring is advised to avoid any potential technical clashing between the two platforms. A project management board for ‘Fully On’ experiment changes assigned to the Developer with relevant links and a brief description maintains the flow of changes on site based on successful strategies. The protocol for any failed or inconclusive experiments are generally re-visited for further iterations and improvement based on analytics. These iterations are migrated to the backlog for any additional work before QA and live launch. All further iterations and statuses are updated on the roadmap document - and any other supporting document tracking to provide the team full referencing.
A constructive CRO process with effective project management tools is essential for large scale experimentation within an organisation. Streamlined communication focus aids productivity, and thus, incremental data generated from an experiment can be positively outstanding.
We're a Manchester Digital Agency specialising in UX & Conversion Rate Optimisation. If you need help with your ecommerce website get in touch today.
Turn your website or app into a revenue generating machine.
We use User Experience (UX) design and Conversion Rate Optimisation to make sure your digital strategy focuses on what your customers care about most.
Call: 0161 706 1620
