Improve conversion rate with emotion tracking: the Coach example
Every webshop knows the problem of conversion rate optimization. How to improve conversion rate has been addressed many, many times all across the web with a lot of tips. At the end, they all boil down to one thing though, A/B testing your adjustments. One post had a list of 39 things you can adjust. My question to you is, when was the last time you ran 39 A/B tests?
Instead of just giving the standard, ‘do this and then that’ outline, I’ll tell you how we analysed the webshop of the popular fashion brand Coach.
Coach reached out to us in July 2018 with the goal of improving the conversion rate of their webshop. Apparently they went through multiple A/B test scenarios and none of that was working well and was actually making them lose money.
The most important aspect for us was to ask the question, ‘what is it exactly that you’re after?’. Is it the conversion rate of one particular product that should be improved or something within the conversion funnel itself?
When it comes to conversion rate optimisation, a lot of variables can be tweaked. To narrow it down, it’s always important to ask yourself or your client these questions first.
The answer came quick: ‘We don’t know, we just want the conversion to go up’.
Ok, that was not very helpful, but our goal was to provide Coach with the biggest bang for their buck. Meaning, which changes would result in the highest return on investment (ROI) for Coach?
What did we do?
It is never a good idea to start testing anything blindly. To make sure we don’t take shots in the dark but rather deliver on their request, we asked Coach for their webshop analytics data.
Analytics data
When it comes to optimization, they understood that it’s good to start with data in the first place. They have provided us with analytics data of 1 week, having a total of 866130 visitors! Luckily that meant we got enough statistical power, even breaking it down into different landing pages would not be a problem. They also added that the percentages of conversions stay roughly constant with slight fluctuations in visitor rates. All these details matter when it comes down to how much we can rely on the data itself.
The bad apple
Going through the data, we started looking at the conversion rates based on landing pages. There was one landing page in particular that performed terribly. It was the landing page of the Dreamer handbag.
The conversion rate itself that resulted from this landing page was 0.05%. Now you might be thinking that this type of conversion rate is not so bad, especially when you compare it to average search statistics across the web.
Let me add two more details:
- Other landing pages had on average 1.5% conversion rate
- 10% of the total traffic came in through this landing page
That basically means a lot of potential conversions are lost and advertising money is going down the drain. The next questions is, ‘why is the conversion rate so low compared to other pages?’.
Why?
The first, most obvious reason for this conversion rate could be the product itself. But is it?
To find an answer to that question, we looked again at the analytics data. The answer was quite clear: the product is not the problem!
The Dreamer handbag itself was responsible for 7% of the total revenue. That is massive for a single product, given that other popular products on the Coach webshop accounted for 7.84% of revenue, combined.
Then what is it on that specific landing page?
As you most likely found on multiple other online articles, now it would be time to go through the list of conversion rate optimisation tips. Oh and don’t forget to finish your guessing with an A/B test.
Luckily, we don’t have to guess blindly.
Testing
During our test, we exposed 100 testers to the Coach landing page of the Dreamer handbag. While the testers were viewing the landing page, we recorded their eye movements, their emotions and their hear rate through their webcam. We only showed the page for 10 seconds to really get the initial implicit reactions and viewing patterns.
This makes it much easier to understand what people are looking at and also how they process / react to it emotionally. From this, we can infer the ‘why’ much easier than guessing blindly.
Plus, we had all the data collected and analysed within 3 days. Generally quicker than preparing for all the A/B tests.
Results
From the raw data, we create easy to interpret visualisations. For the eye tracking we get a heat map. Red = most attention, blue = least attention, no color = no attention received.
From this is it easy to see that the image within the webshop and the slogan on top receive the most attention.
Now that we know what received attention, let’s have a look at how that was processed. For that we combine all the emotions we measure (7 in total, you can have a look here) into an easy interpretable Valence score, which goes from -100 to +100. Negative score means negative emotion, positive score means positive emotion.
The Average Valence score for this landing page was -0.7. You might be thinking that is not so bad considering the range of the score. But you need to keep in mind that this is just a webshop that people are looking at and nothing controversial, which would much easier stir up emotions.
This is already quite telling but let’s dive in 1 step further. We combined the heat map and the Valence score into a Valence map. This makes it simple to see where exactly what type of emotion was present. This way we know what exactly people felt when they looked at something.
Conclusion and impact
From the Valence map you can easily see that the strongest negative peak is caused by the the slogan on the landing page. Looking back at the timeline of the Valence score, that peak comes at ~6 seconds. The image on the left of the products doesn’t get a lot of positive reactions either.
After we saw this reaction to the image, we looked at the other landing pages and only then we noticed that they don’t have an image nor a slogan.
There are now 2 potential routes you can go:
- Get rid of the image and the slogan
- Tweak image and slogan
If you’d go down route 1, then with a fair amount of confidence, given the analytics data of other landing pages, the product itself, and the data we collected, the conversion rate should go up. But how much?
It should get close to the average of the other landing pages (1.5%), but let’s be conservative and say it will only go up to 0.8%.
The Dreamer handbag costs ~ $700, with a conversion rate of 0.05% and ~93800 visitors that means around $33k. Coach is a strong brand but they do use online advertising. Because they are such a strong brand they could potentially pay only $0.1 per visitor coming to their website via advertising. That means then $9380 in online advertising costs. That results in revenue minus advertising costs = $23620.
Redoing this with a conversion rate of 0.08% would result in the same costs for advertising but final revenue minus advertising costs = ~ $43k. Oh and remember that this is per week!
As you can see, the impact itself is quite strong and we managed to deliver the biggest bang for their buck.