Improving ecommerce conversions is a function of many factors. Since a sale is largely dependent on the amount of information a prospect has, improving your site’s informational content will have a large effect on conversions.

As most websites, ecommerce stores have elements and here we have listed them.

When does CRO make sense? As with any investment, there is a time and place for CRO. Let’s get into when and how to implement CRO so it makes sense for your business. The right time for conversion rate optimization will become obvious once you reach the limits of growth through other means.

While conversion optimization can be seen as an exact scientific approach to the problem of increasing conversion rates, there are some caveats. Unlike with math or other exact sciences, there are no definitive answers and solutions in CRO. What might work for one ecommerce store might not work for the next one.

You probably already know that video is the best way to make your products and services easier to understand for your prospects and customers. Until recently, you could only track YouTube videos on your website using specialized code in Google Tag Manager. You can now do this easily as Google added a trigger to Google Tag Manager that lets you set up YouTube video tracking.

Every ecommerce website contains at least a few pages of content longer than a single screen so visitors need to scroll. Google created new triggers and event types recently. Among these: the ability to track visitor scrolling using tags. It enables tracking of how far down the page visitors actually scroll.

Cohort Reports can be found under the Audience Reports section of your Google Analytics dashboard. In its present form, the Cohort Report shows the number of visitors acquired and retained over a given time period. Cohort analysis begins at the start date you select, and can range from one day to 12 weeks.

On a typical ecommerce site, the purchase process is usually visualized and analyzed as a “funnel” of customer behavior. All prospects enter the purchase process at the top of the funnel. Funnel entry is always marked by an event that constitutes a “macro conversion” (for example, adding a product to the cart). Not all prospects, and likely not even a majority, will proceed to the next step. Your funnel content should therefore aim to increase the number of prospects who reach the entry point of the funnel, AND who proceed to the next step.

Customer lifetime value is used to guide efforts in customer and traffic acquisition by showing how much an additional customer is worth in financial terms. When you know how much a customer is worth, it sheds new light on acquisition — and can reveal when acquisition is simply too expensive to be sustainable.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric that you can use to predict how much a given visitor contributes to the goal of your website. Put another way CLV helps you know how much revenue to expect from a visitor who converts. Google Analytics provides reports that can be of help and we go through them in this article.