Optimizing for Highest Leverage

Leverage formula using analytics

If you’re using an analytics program, you can sort your pages by traffic or page value, but it’s the combination of the two that identifies leverage. 

Pageview X Page Value = Highest Impact Experiences

Pageview = Total number of times visitors visit a page (including repeat visits)

Page Value = Transaction revenue / pageviews

Using this simple methodology enables you to rank your site experiences and give you a basis of where to start investigating. You might your about us page, but if it gets virtually no traffic and isn’t in the purchase path, it likely isn’t a valuable starting point for work.

Points of High Traffic (Pageviews)

In your analytics it’ll be easy to see which pages have the highest traffic. There are health metrics to weigh here. What is the bounce rate? Time on site? Revenue per visit?

You need to use analytics. It’s easy to make assumptions about what has the highest traffic until you get into the data. The homepage as an example seems like an obvious point of high traffic, but if you drive most of your traffic through advertising, key landing pages might get more than you think.

Your entry points are routinely higher traffic, and therefore points of high leverage. They might have a lower page value due to their distance from the checkout, but they are a point of high abandonment. If you have a high exit rate or bounce rate, you may be lacking something critical on your landing destinations.

It got drilled into me pretty hard in my eCommerce career that you need to make a strong first impression online. With so many polished competitors one click away, you have to connect to a consumer. I will be going into depth on landing page optimization in a different article, but know that your entry points are a critical aspect of conversion.

Closest to the Sale (Page Value)

Your cart and checkout are two simple places to start with extremely high leverage. The good news is that they are also simple places to optimize. 

• Avoid additional information that distracts from the sale or cause anxiety

• Remove barriers such as requiring an account

• Avoid any surprise costs 

If you have several steps to your checkout process, you can track abandonment rate through the purchase funnel. Sometimes there is an outlier in drop off through one step, which should prompt you to investigate. 

Once I had a spike in abandonment rate on the payment methods step. It turns out our Paypal was throwing errors due to an integration mistake on our end. Keep an eye on your checkout funnel for abnormalities.

Beyond the cart and checkout, product pages, comparison tools and reviews are also points closes to a transaction. They generally have a high page value with significant traffic.

Points of Differentiation

Elements of differentiation are a bit more complicated to explain, as they vary from business to business. They are the elements that are added to our properties to influence conversion and have a lot of leverage.

Examples of differentiation:

• Customer testimonials

• Trustmarkers and awards

• Comparison or buying tools

• Memberships

Harking back to the proximity of competition, it’s imperative that companies identify their opportunities for differentiation and exploit them. Once identified and developed, ensure they are added into the purchase path. I can’t tell you how often companies bury their important content on some random page that people never visit. Get your value proposition front and centre.

This walkthrough is a simplified version of optimizing for leverage. There are some great systems out there to help leadership identify opportunities, my goal is to find a way to empirically score and rank them. Once you can score your priorities, you can most effectively apply your time.