Today is the 9th Nugget in a row with valuable statistics showing past performance of jewelry websites and actionable ideas on what you should be doing with your site today.In two recent Nuggets I showed you the most popular landing pages that seem to attract visitors to your site. Today I've got the list of pages visitors look at the most after arriving at your site. The list isn't at all the same.
The list below is not all inclusive but it does show many of the most popular content types on a retail jeweler's website for the Holiday 2012 season. The number shown indicates the percentage of their total page views each visitors spent in those areas of the websites. I'll explain each one in more detail below.
31.84% Catalog Category Browsing
16.21% Home Page
11.76% Uncategorized Catalog Browsing
11.16% Product Detail Page
6.38% Designer Page
1.70% About Us Page
1.62% Educational Pages
1.31% Custom Designs
1.22% Our Services
As I said above, this percentage indicates the portion of their page views while on the website, not time. So if someone viewed 10 pages on a site you could say they viewed the home page 1 time and browsed 3 pages of the product categories in the online catalog.
Here's the breakdown...
*Home Page*
During the Holiday 2012 season 62% of all jewelry website traffic arrived through the home page, but visitors quickly jumped from that page and rarely returned. This is why we only see 16.21% of all page viewing happening here.
*Uncategorized Catalog Browsing*
Following along the typical order of a website user, we see that they enter the product catalog and browse around a little bit before selecting the product category that most interests them. Products appearing in this uncategorized area are usually randomly arranged. This area of the site only has 11.76% of viewing.
*Catalog Category Browsing*
During the Holiday 2012 season, the section of the websites that has the most views was what I refer to as Catalog Category Browsing. Each product category shows only products for that group and this accounted for 31.84% of all pages views per visit. The websites with more detailed category options were able to engage their visitors for a longer amount of time. With this in mind you should consider splitting up your "Rings" main category to include "engagement rings," "wedding bands," and any subset that makes sense. Also make sure to hide any subsets if they don't have products.
*Product Detail Page*
The product detail page is what I refer to as the page with all the specific jewelry item information. This includes the Add to Cart button, the long description, and multiple views of each jewelry item. On average every visitor viewed at least 1 product. This translated into 11.16% of their pages viewed. Last year I tracked more than 5% of landing page traffic to Product Detail Pages. This year you can easily increase that number if you write longer product descriptions.
*Designer Page*
Do you have individual pages on your website dedicated to specific jewelry designers, or specific jewelry lines? You should because your customers love to read this type of page and it accounted for 6.38% of the pages viewed while on a website. This is something you should be adding to your site before the Holiday 2013 season.
*About Us*
So many jewelers tell me they just don't want to talk about their store history; some even say they are boring. Apparently your website visitors disagree with that because the average visitor was willing to view those pages 1.7% of the time. In other words, the visitor is checking to make sure you're a real person working at a real store. Want to jazz up your about us page? Swap out your normal store photos on that page with photos showing the store decorated for the holidays.
*Educational Pages*
So are you a real person who's willing to provide friendly service to your customers or are you just another online e-commerce site that wanted to make a sale? Providing educational information on your website helps to attract visitors but it also give them a reason to stay longer on your site. The average visitor during the Holiday 2012 season spent 1.62% of their viewing on educational pages like the 4C's. One way to attract more visitors during the holiday season is to write educational pages that relate your jewelry to the season.
*Custom Designs*
I was happy to see that the grouping of Custom Design pages appeared high enough in my list to report on. This group of pages included some websites that have mini catalogs of their custom work and some websites that have a few pages that explain their custom design process. Although these pages didn't carry much weight to attract visitors to websites during the 2012 Holidays they managed to attract 1.31% of the pages viewed. Make sure you add your latest custom designs to your website as soon as you can.
*Our Services*
As I explained previously, it's always better to split up your individual services onto their own pages than to lump them all together. During the 2012 Holiday season this page type accounted for 1.22% of all pages viewed. You should embellish this page as much as possible. Here's an interesting note: The Our Services page attracted 1.29% of landing page views in August 2013 compared to 1.02% during the 2012 Holidays. I'm going to assume this is because of the gift-giving mentality that's common in December with fewer people looking for a jeweler that provides a specific service.
This list is far from complete but it give you a starting point of the type of content you should be adding to your website before the holiday season starts.
