With year-end peak shopping seasons approaching, e-commerce campaigns need to consider these four ways to entice and engage site visitors.

In analyzing 35bn e-commerce browsing sessions and 161bn page views across 2,942 websites, a digital experience analytics platform is asserting that “category pages are the most engaging pages of any page on a site.”

With increased activity linked to better outcomes for engagement and conversion, ensuring category pages are optimized and friction-free should be a priority for retail brands preparing for the busiest season of the year that is upon us.

As businesses firm up their year-end peak season e-commerce campaigns, understanding how customers behave online and why, is key to a successful customer experience strategy and should remain a priority, according to the 2023 Digital Experience Benchmark Explorer by Contentsquare.

The firm has recommended four actions that businesses can consider to prepare their web properties for increased traffic and drive additional revenue:

    • Optimize customer engagement: Take every step possible to optimize the experience of your customers by monitoring and measuring content performance, and ensuring customers are engaged every step of the way.
    • Make the connection between campaigns and on-site activity: Integrate digital experience analytics with web analytics and campaign tracking to maximize the returns-on-investment from campaign spend by creating experiences that engage and convert.
    • Embrace real-time analysis: With increased traffic comes increased possibility of errors and other obstacles that can impact peak season results. Setting up real-time alerts is key to identifying and fixing issues quickly, before conversions are impacted.
    • Customers wait for no slow e-commerce sites: When customers are forced to wait for pages that take more than two seconds to load, bounce rates have ever reach 49%, with nearly half of visitors bouncing, according to the data. Slow loading times also have a negative effect on content consumption. The data indicates that visitors exposed to slow page loads view one page less, on average.

Said the firm’s Senior Vice President (Asia Pacific & Japan): “Designing a customer-first experience that drives conversion is a critical step for APAC brands ahead of the peak shopping season.”