Tactics > supercharged marketing
Part 1
Which way to navigate your website
By Roger Willcocks
How to organise the products on your website and what mechanics you can employ to help your visitor find them
G
etting visitors around an online shop is surely one of the biggest challenges of an ecommerce website. It is up there with customer acquisition (getting visitors there in the first
instance) and conversion (getting them to buy). With overall bounce rates—the percentage of visitors who exit on the first page—at 30 percent, those landing and follow-on pages in the “customer journey” need to be carefully planned. Between the 70 percent of visitors who arrive on a shopping site and, say, the 3 percent who actually make a purchase, that’s 67 percent of all visitors traipsing through seven or eight pages of a website then exiting, bored or frustrated. If they can’t find what they’re looking for,
your visitors will use the search box, which although not the theme of this article, can provide vital clues as to what your visitors are seeking and what they can’t find readily.
Principles Let’s start off with some basic principles and
look at the role of the “homepage”. Typically this page will receive 40 percent of all site entrances. Why would a visitor arrive on this page? In most instances, a visitor will come to this page if he is aware of you and your brand already. Most traffic coming here will be typing in your URL or entering your brand name into Google. Think about it: if visitors arrived from a search engine having typed in a product name or category, for example mohair cushion or girl’s hoodie, they will end up on a category or landing page. Or be sent there by an email or an ad. The navigation challenge is to get these visitors into the relevant part of the site as quickly as possible. We’ll ignore the debate about communicating brand values and overall proposition on this occasion and assume that your products are unique and beautiful, attractively priced and packaged, quick to deliver and backed by superb customer service. What we mean by “relevant part” of the site is
determined by the purpose of the visitor, which, 95 percent of the time, will be to carry out a
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shopping-related task—browse your product range, discover what’s available, see what’s new or on offer, get some inspiration or finally, buy something specifically. Breaking down visitor intent in this way makes the task of designing a navigation framework a lot easier. Let’s look at these scenarios in turn. The folk who are browsing your range
and are already familiar with your products will probably survive the journey. They have already been through the experience of learning how to operate your website. They understand your product categories. The emphasis is to expose the visitor to as many of your categories as possible and enable him to go to the desired category as quickly as possible. An obvious pitfall here is the chief executive’s desire to have branded products—collections, ranges and styles—that have names that only the initiated, or the marketing department, can understand. How will a new website visitor find a cashmere wrap if it’s buried in this season’s exciting Milano collection?
Top navigation For genuine enquirers who seek to understand
the entirety of your range with minimal fuss, you need to provide a vehicle that shows off the whole lot without too many clicks. Nowadays, the best way of doing this is via “multilayered dropdowns” in your top navigation. The essence of this view is to present your
top-level categories as the top navigation banner. Moving to one of these will reveal its subcategories and the categories within that (for example, mens/tops/polo shirts) and enable the visitor to go straight to that product line. This works fine provided you have two to six subcategories and three to 10 “sub- subcategories” within that. You’ll appreciate that the dropdown menu will look ungainly or even unprofessional if the proportions are skewed. If you can’t quite populate one of these sensibly and elegantly, use simple one- column dropdowns. In all cases, to state the obvious, make sure the visitor is directed to the specific place he chooses.
Category hierarchy Another consideration is the management
of the category hierarchy. In a nutshell, it must be maintainable by whatever content management system or ecommerce platform you are using. For example, in the Magento open source platform, the category tree can be edited in entirety in the admin panel, including
Direct Commerce Catalogue e-business
www.catalog-biz.com
Next adds Christmas and Offers to its top-level navigation
John Lewis’s flyout menu is a good example of top-level navigation handled well.
Lands’ End uses a two-layered flyout menu in its top nav bar
category creation, moving, copying, deleting, and so on. A particular point of pain can be the management of the top navigation categories themselves—especially once day-to-day merchandising begins. Based on a study of your trading categories and product taxonomy, you design your website with eight top categories, all under your control. You add three—where
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