The company

In creative is a marketing agency focused on improving website performance, creating online ads, promoting clients on social sites and helping with the recruitment of new talent.

It has worked for brands like McDonalds and their CMO Michal Baturko Olbert has shared with us a story of an underperforming client.

The challenge

Conversion rates were abysmal. This e-shop didn’t perform nearly as well as it could. Order completion was at 18 % while the industry standard is around 40 % and it can go even higher.

In creative needed to figure out what creates friction for this e-shop. Figure out where it’s leaking money. And what to change.

They’ve been doing this for 12 years. And after this much time, you can just look at a page and see possible problems instantly. But guess what? Even with all that experience, you can’t just go and start making changes.

“Instinct can be useful. But only as initial hunch about what’s happening. That doesn’t mean we’ll start fixing things right away as our first guess might be wrong,” says Michal Baturko Olbert, CMO of In creative.

So what to do then? You need data. And the right analytics tools.

They allow you to explore what are the most likely sources of problems and to increase the amount of winning AB tests.

And that still assumes things. It assumes that the client agrees to run AB tests, which might be a challenge of its own.

The solution

For In creative it was important to analyze funnels.

The company used Smartlook for this. And it meant that the agency could watch why people were leaving the e-shop it was optimizing and look for patterns in that user behavior.

Funnel for the ordering process quickly revealed that the shipping prices were too steep.

It was only at the last step of the funnel when people were shown the final price with shipping included. But you could see a summary of product prices the whole time, no matter where you were in the e-shop. So prices of the products themselves were not a problem.

And the last step of the ordering process was the exact point at which people were leaving. “It became clear what the problem was. It was all about shipping prices,” says Michal.

This is how funnels look in Smartlook.

This gave In creative the idea to change the funnel so that shipping would be shown first. Comparison of shipping prices with competition came next. And surely enough, the e-shop’s shipping was more expensive.

So In creative suggested their client a slight decrease of shipping costs and adding more post offices where you can pick your order up. And the number of completed orders skyrocketed.

The result

The changes brought over half a million dollars in yearly revenue.

That’s because the number of completed orders jumped from 18% to 47%. That’s a 161% increase achieved in 2 months.

As you can probably guess, the client was ecstatic.

It took the agency about 25 hours of work and programmers implemented the changes within another 15 hours.

“With Smartlook we can do our work twice as fast. Sure some of it is thanks to our growing experience but watching people using a website is simply essential,” Michal told us.

Michal also says that replays make it much easier to convince clients to do AB testing. “When you can visualize problems to a client, show them a funnel and explain what numbers they should be at… it’s easier to warm them up to AB tests.”

These are some of the reasons Smartlook became a crucial part of the optimization process at In creative.

Increase the number of orders in your e-shop

author Andrej Brabec

CRO specialist

The post How an agency used Smartlook to increase e-shop orders by 161 % appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

What do you use Smartlook for?

We use Smartlook recordings and heatmaps to better understand the behaviors of the visitors of our clients’ webshops and websites, and we also use it for CRO. In other words, Smartlook helps us track whether visitors follow expected conversion paths or not. In cases where visitors drop out of the conversion funnel at any point, we start looking at Smartlook recordings to see why they leave. We then optimize the funnel and increase our client’s conversion rate based on this insight.

Which teams in your company use Smartlook?

The UX team, which consists of me and one other colleague. Also, the SEO team occasionally uses Smartlook to check navigation menus in our clients’ webshops.

What problem does Smartlook help you solve?

The main obstacle of a digital agency is understanding the behaviors of visitors of our clients’ e-commerce stores. In a digital space, you can’t physically see the visitor and their behavior the way you can in a brick-and-mortar store. Smartlook enables you to do exactly that — see your visitor’s behavior as if they were in a physical store.

The combination of recordings, event tracking, and conversion funnels that Smartlook plans to launch will also save me a fair amount of time that I now have to spend switching between various systems. I would summarize it like this in terms of user behavior: Google Analytics tells us where the problem is, heatmaps show us what the problem is, and recordings reveal why the problem is happening.

How did you deal with this issue before?

Before user recording technology came around, there basically wasn’t a way for UX specialists to see what exactly visitors were doing on a website, so it was difficult to understand their behaviors. You were just guessing. The suggested solutions were basically subjective opinions of UX consultants or IT guys sitting at a table with no tangible data to support them.

Can you quantify how Smartlook helps you?

At the end of each project for a client, we send them a report with a summary of work done, goals reached, and suggestions for what to improve. Insights from Smartlook alone usually give us around 10 webshop improvement suggestions for each client, which we will put in our report.

What made you choose Smartlook over other analytics solutions?

I was looking on the web for new heatmap products to stay up to date with the latest online UX tools. I stumbled upon Smartlook and found out it can actually do more things, like recordings. Plus, the plans to launch event tracking and funnels are great. Smartlook was easy to use and more affordable than other solutions, so I started to use it on the websites of several new clients, and so far it looks like we’ll stick with it. I especially like the option to show historical data in heatmaps. This way, I create heatmaps already filled with data and don’t have to wait.

author Vladimír Šandera

Cofounder, optimist

The post Smartlook Helps RobertNemec.com Boost CRO of Their Clients’ Funnels appeared first on Smartlook Blog.