March 11, 2015
nu3 is an online retailer of nutrients and food supplements, which belongs to one of the biggest German incubators, Project A. nu3’s challenge was to increase sales and conversions on the website across all devices – desktop, tablet and mobile. nu3’s team needed help in understanding what improvements could benefit their site.
Mobilising Google’s multi-screen expertise
nu3 took the opportunity to obtain consultancy from Google’s Dublin-based specialist team that provides expert optimisation support and guidance around multi-screen conversions. The team developed a simple data-driven methodology based on user insights from nu3’s Google Analytics account data and A/B testing.
The philosophy of Google’s advanced optimisation team is that a brand doesn’t need to spend lots of hours and budget on redesigning an entire site to generate more conversions. The first step in the team’s pragmatic approach was to use Google Analytics advanced segmentation capabilities. For example, segments included the group of users who see product details but don’t move to the shopping cart step, and the group of those who see product details and do progress to the cart. Looking at groups of consumers in this way would help nu3 understand user behaviour, including what drove consumers to complete an action or not.
A little modification can change everything
Based on the data, the team was able to identify priority pages that needed to be optimised, and isolated potential features that could help bridge the gap between users who convert and those who don’t. A hypothesis was established: customers would be more inclined to buy a product if they were shown the number of items remaining in stock on the product page.
To test this hypothesis, the teams used A/B testing. They added the new stock levels feature only on certain product pages, then used a Google Analytics ecommerce reports to track the conversion rate differential between pages with and without the feature.
Small change, impressive results
The test demonstrated that customers were more likely to buy a product if the number of items remaining in stock were displayed. In fact, nu3 saw a real increase in terms of conversion rate. Overall conversions – in the form of online sales – increased by 5.9%, with 5.2% more visitors to product detail pages reaching the cart page than before.
After the positive results of using tests to improve business results, nu3 has put plans in place for further A/B tests to focus on improving the user experience on different screens. Going forward, using Google Analytics data and testing hypotheses based on Google Analytics insights will be at the core of improving the nu3 user experience.
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