Macys.com Improves Conversions Up to 17% With Landing Page, Nav Tweaks

While Macys.com has been growing as the online presence to the well-known retail brand for more than a decade, Darren Stoll, Director Marketing Analytics, isn’t one to stand pat. About a year ago, he began taking apart their Web site and putting it back together for the sake of improving navigability and overall ROI.

During the process, he realized that the first and last clicks in a customer’s sales experience were getting all of the ROI credit. The in-between touch points were being regarded as worthless in the equation.

“What are the ad placements -- those middle clicks -- really worth?” Stoll asks. “Those interactions should be assigned value. For instance, the customer might come in contact with our brand at a search engine, then see us at a shopping portal, then visit our Web site and then see Macys.com in a blog and *then* convert to sale. How do you give credit to those other [touches] along the way?”

Stoll and his team knew they were months, if not years, away from devising a concrete ROI equation that reflected the customer experience and made “spreadsheet” sense to their higher-ups. While zeroing in on a more-accurate ROI methodology, they continued testing site behavior to improve two areas that go hand-in-hand: landing pages and site navigation.

> Step #1. Marketing diagnostics

Stoll wasn’t just interested in how visitors arrived at the site, but also the points at which they left without converting. Here are the key site analytics they extracted and ended up strategically applying to everything from SEM/SEO to merchandising.

> 42% of visitors left immediately after landing on the first page.
> 38% abandoned once they proceeded to the second page.
> 40% left after continuing to a third page.

However, the numbers dropped “significantly” from the fourth page on, which, of course, led to better conversions. “The numbers were pretty startling,” he says. “We wanted to see similar results for the earlier pages that we saw for the fourth page and beyond.”

> Step #2. Inspect search-driven landing pages

This data told Stoll and his team something about SEM/SEO landing pages as well. “We had to ask, ‘Is that the page we are fundamentally trying to drive the customer to?’ And the answer in a lot of cases was, ‘No.’ ”

Next, they analyzed varying campaigns instead of running A/B tests. An interesting takeaway from the comparatives was that Macys.com customers acted differently depending upon what search engine they arrived from.

Stoll began using different landing pages for their expensive keyword buys, such as “bed and bath” at Google, Yahoo! and AOL.

> Step #3. Rework landing pages by user experience

They also considered new visitor behavior versus returning customers. First-timers “were finding out what’s available, where it is and those things. The second or third visit is different because they are familiar with what’s being offered and where.”

So, they created search landing pages that allowed these different types of users to experience the site at their required paces. For instance, those querying with terms indicating a newness to the online brand, such as “Macy’s shoes,” were taken to a landing page where they could easily access shoe information, but also explore the rest of what the site offered.

In addition, those who arrived after more-specific searches, such as “Calvin Klein shoes,” saw a landing page with the brand’s selections at the site as well as other offerings.

> Step #4. Fine-tune the navigation bar

Stoll and his team also determined that the left-hand navigation across the site was contributing to abandonment. They wanted to move all of the major categories above the fold, so they reduced each department’s left-hand navigation by 30 % -- deleting as many as nine categories. In the men’s department, they:

	Combined similar categories, such as Polos & Tees.
	Removed categories that were basically duplicates, such as Shirts Casual and Shirts Dress into the more-encompassing Shirts.
	Removed bottom-performing categories, such as Hoodies & Sweatshirts
	Alphabetized the order of all classification categories

The initiative did exactly what Stoll and his team set out to achieve and then some. “We are doing a better job of landing them in a place that enables the final purchase [step], but also in some cases, introduces them to the online brand.”

They also reduced what they consider to be time-wasting activity by 30% per user. Getting all of the categories above the fold contributed heavily to the performance increases, Stoll says. 21% of their customers are able to locate their desired products when they land on category pages. Better landing pages and improved navigation have raised conversion rates as much as 17% in the Men’s Department.

“We are setting better expectations in terms of what we have in that category,” he says. “The improvements have been spectacular.”

But has this changed Macys.com’s philosophy on those “in-between clicks” and ROI spending? “It hasn’t affected our advertising yet, but it will in the future,” Stoll says. While the strategy is still influx, based on what they’ve learned so far, Stoll sees divvying up his ad budget across the following customer click trail with eight touch points (email, search, shopping portal, etc.):

> First and last customer brand interactions, 25% each.
> Second and seventh, 15% each.
> Third, fourth, fifth and sixth, 5% each.

Darren Stoll will be speaking at the ad:tech San Francisco conference on April 24-26, 2007. For more information, go to http://www.ad-tech.com