Does a quick menu to popular collections lift homepage conversion?
We added a quick menu linking to popular collections on the homepage. Conversion fell 8.3% and revenue per visitor 6.5% over 14 days.
Lost Responsive 14 days Called at 90% Reviewed
The hypothesis
By adding a quick menu that links to popular collections, we will give visitors a faster path to what most people buy, resulting in more product views and a higher conversion rate.
A quick menu to popular collections had lifted revenue on a sister site, so we tested the same idea here.
The menu sat in the header, so it had to work on every page template, and we ran it site-wide. About 75% of this site's traffic is mobile.
What we changed
We added a quick menu linking to popular collections on the homepage.
- New quick menu added to the site header
- Links to popular collections
- Shown on every page template
The result
Conversion fell 8.3% and revenue per visitor fell 6.5%.
Average order value and pages per session stayed flat. Visitors browsed as much as before and spent about the same when they bought. Fewer of them decided to buy.
Most of the drop came from mobile, which makes up about 75% of this site's traffic. We paused the test at 14 days.
Shane’s note
For me, this shows that a change that worked on 1 website may not work on another, and can even hurt it. This is why we test instead of just accepting best practices.
What we took from it
Visitors here did not recognize the collections the menu named.
The menu won on the sister site, where its collections were widely understood. The collections here were less familiar, so the menu offered names visitors did not recognize instead of a clear shortcut. The loss was heaviest on mobile, where most of this site's visitors shop.