#1 Simplify Your Site #2 Make Every Second Count #3 Rescue Dead-End Experiences #4 Tame Your Core Web Vitals #5 Change How You View Analytics
Every Shopper and Their Black Friday Cyber Monday Experience Matters
When it comes to the holidays, some things never change. Like your customers’ expectations for a frictionless digital experience.
But if you’re not taking a fresh look at your holiday playbook, then you’re missing out on opportunities to build customer trust and loyalty and boost sales during the time of year you need them the most. Consumers looking to keep the season merry and bright spend half of their holiday budgets over the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) period.
Meaning it’s the best chance for online and omnichannel brands to bring in more site traffic and dazzle new and returning visitors with remarkably seamless experiences to grow year-over-year revenue.
The stakes are higher for eCommerce brands to maximize sales this holiday. All while trying to do so against a wave of massive layoffs, shrinking budgets, and fewer resources.
Here’s what retailers learned last year:
Inflation was top of mind for online holiday shoppers, making promotions earlier in the year and throughout the season more important than ever.
For the first time, most online sales during BFCM came from mobile devices (51%), compared to 46% the year before.
Although expectations were lukewarm, online consumer spending increased more than 4% compared to last year for a record $35.27 billion in online sales.
Every shopper – and the digital experience they receive –matters. For a rundown of the fastest and slowest retail sites during BFCM check out the free Cyber Week 2022 Report
#1 Simplify Your Site
If your site takes too long to load, your visitors won’t have the patience or tenacity to make a purchase and instead will abandon for a competitor’s site.
During BFCM, the last thing you want is to break your site. So the question is how can you get the most out of your current digital experience?
App-y Holidays Pro Tip: Shopping on your app should be as effortless as shopping on your site. A welldesigned, easy-to-use app with frictionless features like 1-click checkout can increase revenue by 29%. So, monitor application turns, API calls, errors, and app crashes to provide an optimal app experience.
Look under the hood of your site for underperforming pages:
• Inventory all third-party tags and services on your site.
• Evaluate all long-running JavaScript functions and JavaScript errors.
• Remove tags not being used or non essential for BFCM.
• Implement a Content Security Policy (CSP) to prevent unauthorized tags slowing down your site or putting customers at risk.
• Review content caching at the Content Delivery Network (CDN) and on the browser to ensure your site’s rich content is optimized for speed and scalability.
Make Every Second Count #2
Digitally-savvy, financially conscious consumers have exceptionally short attention spans and high expectations. So, if your site is a little slow, you’ll lose them. And a lot of slowness is even worse.
Don’t give your site visitors a reason to begin their shopping journey with you and end it with a competitor.
Achieve an optimal site experience:
• Check your site speed and user experience metrics.
• Pre-scale your web infrastructure baseline before BFCM.
• Look for long-running JavaScript Functions
• Tackle costly LCP subparts in your LCP to optimize page performance.
Online retailers can receive a spike in traffic as much as 10x their normal levels during BFCM so every minute of downtime could mean thousands or millions of dollars in lost revenue.
“We are excited to see the great work Blue Triangle is doing around Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) sub-part timings as a way to help their customers get actionable insights into improving their user experiences.”
Melissa Mitchell, Google, Web Ecosystem Consultant
“With Blue Triangle, we have more confidence that performance and page load on the site is going to be monitored in a way that will alert me and the team when things go wrong. Like during holiday peak when we generate more demand and traffic to the website.”
Derek Gominger, COO Global eCommerce at Lenovo
#3 Rescue Dead-End Experiences
Imagine the excitement of your customers receiving a Deal Busting Promo for your hottest item. They’re ready to buy, but the link brings them to an out-of-stock or broken page. This can dampen the holiday cheer of millions of shoppers and you’ll miss out on revenue.
When customers encounter stock-outs, retailers can lose nearly half of intended purchases. Those abandoned purchases translate into sales losses of about 4% for a typical retailer. For the largest retailers and eCommerce sites, that could mean $400 million a year in lost sales.1
Here’s what you can do to prevent stockouts from causing online walkouts:
• Monitor the customer journey across your site and mobile app for friction caused by out-of-stock items or inventory issues, anytime, anywhere it occurs.
• Collect user experience data to understand its business impact so you can prioritize restocking the highest performing products your customers demand.
• Suggest other relevant products or fully build out the product page’s content to keep shoppers shopping.
• Construct a hybrid page for out-of-stock items that functions as a product listing page combined with a product page.
Rescue Dead-End Experiences #3
App-y Holidays Pro Tip: Ditto for your app experience to prevent costly digital walkouts. Mobile app users are often your most loyal customers, so you must provide superior experiences to keep them satisfied – and keep them shopping. Consumers view 286% more products and add items to their carts at an 85% higher rate when shopping from an app versus mobile browser. 2
BFCM content is frequently added to your site to drive traffic and conversions. But if pages are moved or renamed, or no longer exist, then customers will be driven to a dreaded 404 Error –Page Not Found. BFCM pages can also be contentious and lead to finger pointing (and maybe the occasional middle finger) because marketing teams want hi-fidelity, engineering teams want speed, so you need to strike the optimal balance.
Dead pages can cause customer friction, harm your brand’s reputation, and damage your site’s SEO and Google search rankings. When it comes to successful holiday SEO, the earlier you start, the faster you’ll climb to the top of search results. Here’s what you can do now:
• Make every second count.
• Prioritize repairing the most impactful links.
• Tame your Core Web Vitals.
1 Stock-Outs Cause Walkouts | hbr.org
2 11 Reasons Why You Need a Mobile eCommerce App | BuildFire
#4 Tame Your Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals (CWV) are used by Google to measure the experience users receive from your site, including page loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
By scoring well across all CWV metrics, including Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) which replaced FID in March of 2024, Google will put a premium on your user experience.
Ensuring each page has healthy CWV scores puts the user experience first, and your site will also benefit from higher organic Google search rankings, which, in turn, can mean more site traffic. To realize improved SEO value in time for BFCM, you must have good scores in place before October ends because a page will pass Google’s CWV assessment if it meets the recommended targets for each metric at the 75th percentile of page views over a 28-day period because Google collects and updates CWV data every 28 days.
A better user experience also impacts the business KPIs you care about, such as abandonment or bounce rates, conversions, and revenue.
• Prioritize user experience improvements that’ll also optimize your CWV scores
• Use a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights field data.
• Go beyond knowing your scores to identify why they’re underperforming.
Tame Your Core Web Vitals #4
Are you always watching your Core Web Vitals, comparing them to your competitors? It’s easy to know what your CWV scores are, but not why they’re drifting. Only VitalScope for Core Web
#5 Change How You View Analytics
It only takes 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your site that determines whether they’ll stay or click to a competitor. That means page performance and friction is costing you lost revenue.
Amazon found that every 100 milliseconds in added page load time cost them 1% in sales, and it quickly become one of the most cited page speed data points.
Contrary to popular opinion, optimum speed is unique and varies by site and page, and more importantly, by the type of user on your site. The only way to know is by correlating speed to revenue, which you can do with a conversion rate curve.
For example, brands that attract a 35+ year old audience can oftentimes have a slower site than a brand that attracts Gen Z Also, their purpose on the site also changes the journey, for example if someone is shopping for clothing and accessories versus a large electronic purchase. So, the user type difference changes the conversion rate curve and what “optimal” site speed means.
When you look at a standard analytics engine, like Google, Adobe, or your record of choice, they’ll absolutely give you a conversion rate on a page.
Maybe it’s 2.5% or 3%, whatever the case may be, and if you’re meeting your KPI goals, then that’s exceptional. But, what about if you’re expecting a 4% conversion rate and instead you get 3%?
Traditional analytics tools don’t direct you where to go to see what happened or what to do about it. So, oftentimes teams start shot gunning at the wall trying to figure out what needs to be done to attain lost revenue or even identify how much revenue was lost.
Change How You View Analytics #5
Conversion Rate / Sessions
Page Name: pdp
Device: Desktop
For example, say 1.5 million visitors came to a site, the conversion rate curve will show you that when a page loaded in 2.5 seconds, 5% of visitors converted to revenue in that exact session.
But when that same page loads in 4.5 seconds, conversion drops to 3.58%. So, we’ve lost 27.5% of our customers in just 2 extra seconds because of user experience friction. If you can identify the pages where this happens and move that subset of users from the right to the left, they’ll convert at a higher rate and spend more money.
You can use conversion rate curves to understand the reliance your users have on site performance. Is your conversion rate curve very steep? That means your users crave a fast experience, and when it’s slow, their experience is terrible. Or is it flat? If so, that means you’ve achieved perceived performance, which is the ultimate goal of an eCommerce experience.
Ask your analytics team for the conversion rate curves on your critical pages so you can laser-focus your development resources to prioritize optimizing the pages that’ll bring you more revenue, which is going to mean less revenue going to your competitors.
The stakes are higher than ever.
It pays to be prepared.
About Blue Triangle Blue Triangle is the only complete platform purpose-built for Continuous Experience Optimization that begins with quantifying the cost of revenuerobbing friction and ends with validating revenue and business outcomes. We empower online and omnichannel brands across industries to build a culture of continually improving their customers’ digital experience to maximize revenue and ROI.
BFCM has a surprising and sneaky way of arriving quickly. So, as you gear up for your big sales event, it’s important to find solutions and strategies to optimize your site and mobile app.
We hope the optimizations in this eBook help you feel more prepared to meet your customers’ expectations.
And remember, while you’re focusing on KPIs and efforts to drive sales, don’t lose sight of the natural connections that bring us together during the holidays and a willingness to embrace the season.
Cheers to a prosperous BFCM and a happy new year
Get your Friction Quantified Analysis today Don’t wait! It’s not too late to prep your site
How much is revenue-robbing friction costing you? Find out now with a free Friction Quantified Analysis. Your personalized findings will be based on your current sales levels, meaning the actual cost of friction could be much higher if you don’t make changes before holiday peak.
