Ecommerce landing pages: everything you need to know

With hot competition amid digital marketplaces and product advertising, everyone's trying to get their product in front of consumer eyes. But that's only half the battle. The next is an optimised product landing page (or product detail page, PDP) which loads quickly, and provides concise, relevant information to nudge your visitor to convert. So what should your PDP look like?

Ecommerce landing page best practices

When it comes to best practices for your product pages, there are a few things you should always do:

• If you can, provide pictures of your product in its intended use, or modelled on a real person. This helps your audience understand how it should be used, how it works, or how it could look on them.
• Optimise your page for fast loading. Reduce the file size of your images and set them to ‘lazy loading’ to help your page load faster. Not only does Google favour pages with fast loading times, but your user experience will improve too.
• Keep the main actions above the page fold. If it’s not immediately clear what to do with the page, your customers will likely bounce back or exit altogether. Make sure your CTAs are clear and visible without needing to scroll.
• Provide social proof. Why should your audience trust this product? Why should they trust you? Using real reviews helps reduce friction that might be holding your audience back from checking out. Shopify provides a free product reviews app.
• Ensure the messaging matches the ad. Any confusion might send your visitors bouncing back to the SERPs.
• Test! Test! Test! How does it work on mobile? Can you improve device-responsiveness? If you’re coming across errors, a slow loading time, or users find it difficult to read and interact with your page, we recommend a bit more fine-tuning before you go live. 

What is a good bounce rate for ecommerce?

In the world of online retail, a bounce rate in the range of 25% to 40% is generally seen as a solid benchmark. However, what constitutes a "good" bounce rate can vary depending on the nature of your products, your industry, and which page type you look at. Below is data from CXL which shows average benchmark bounce rates by channel for the Advertising & Marketing, Online Communities, and Shopping industry categories. 

• Display: 56.50%
• Social: 54%
• Direct: 49.90%
• Paid search: 44.10%
• Organic search: 43.60%
• Referral: 37.50%
• Email: 35.20%

How to reduce bounce rate?

There are several things you can do to reduce your bounce rate. First, you should optimise your page load time, as long wait times are a major cause of high bounce rates. 

Second, you should focus on making sure that your page content is relevant and engaging to your visitors. You can also use A/B testing to find out what content and design changes have the most impact on reducing your bounce rate. 

Finally, you should focus on providing a good user experience, as this can help reduce your bounce rate significantly.

What is a good conversion rate for ecommerce?

Generally speaking, a good conversion rate for ecommerce is between 2-5%. This means that for every 100 clicks your store receives, you can expect to make between 2 and 5 orders. Ecommerce conversion rates depend on a variety of factors, like product, target audience, region, and the industry you sell in.

You can see some average conversion rates by industry below:

• Fashion and accessories: 2.53%
• Health and beauty: 4.06%
• Electronics: 4.88%
• Food and beverage: 1.78%
• Home and garden: 1.87%
• Office supplies: 2.55%
• Pet supplies: 4.06%
• Sporting goods: 2.28%
• Toys and hobbies: 3.79%

Data collected from Bidnamic clients in 2022

Remember that these are just averages, and that conversion rates still vary by a number of factors.

How to increase ecommerce conversion rate?

There are a few things you can do to increase conversion rate, but the most effective strategies include optimising the user experience, using effective marketing techniques, and taking advantage of the latest ecommerce technologies. 

Optimising the user experience: User experience (UX) is key when it comes to ecommerce conversion rates. Make sure that your website is intuitive and easy to use, attractive, and secure. Don’t forget to optimise the navigation and checkout process to ensure it’s simple and fast so users can make friction-free purchases. 

Using effective marketing techniques: To increase ecommerce conversion rates, ensure you’re considering the full scope of your marketing activities to reach potential customers, and re-engage existing customers and visitors who have bounced. This includes creating compelling ads and content, running effective email campaigns, using social media, and using remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA).

Take advantage of technology: This includes updating your website to the latest version of HTML, leveraging machine learning for better targeting, and using A/B testing to identify effective on-site content. 

By following these strategies, you can significantly increase your ecommerce conversion rate.

Why is page speed important?

Consumers expect items and services ‘on demand’. Patience for web page loading has dropped. Research finds that when page loading speed increases from one second to five seconds the probability of bounce increases by 90%.

On top of losing shoppers, retailers who don’t optimise their page speed could be putting their ads at risk with Google. In 2018, Google revealed that loading speed would become a significant landing page factor for Google ads.

Our own research found that for every second a page loads faster, the conversion rate increases by 17%.

How to improve page speed on an ecommerce website?

• Optimise image files. This may mean compressing files or converting some of your images to other file formats like .jpg or .webp.
• Minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Minifying these resources can drastically reduce the size of the files and thus the loading time.
• Enable browser caching. By enabling browser caching, the browser will save a copy of the website content in the user's computer, so that the user does not have to re-download the same content every time they visit the website.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs host a copy of the website content in multiple locations around the world, meaning users closer to the CDN location can load the content faster.
• Optimise code. Using techniques like minification, lazy loading, and code-splitting can help reduce the amount of code that needs to be loaded.

Following these steps can help speed up your page loading, and reduce bounce rates.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are specific criteria that Google considers important to a web page's overall user experience. The report shows how your pages perform based on real-world usage data (sometimes called field data).

URL performance is grouped by status (Good, Needs improvement, and Poor), URL group, and three key metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures how long it takes a page’s main content to load. It records the time taken for a user to see the majority of on-screen content.
• First Input Delay (FID): This measures how long it takes for the user to be able to engage with the page. Depending on the page, this could include scrolling, filling in a field, or clicking the navigation, amongst other things.*
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures visual stability. That’s to say, you could move the cursor to click an element, but the structure suddenly shifts as you do, resulting in a click on something else. A page with a good CLS score will quickly provide visual stability, avoiding frustrations like the one above.

*FID is to be replaced by Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a Core Web Vital metric in March 2024.
INP assesses responsiveness using data from the Event Timing API. INP observes the latency of all interactions a user has made with the page and reports a single value which nearly all interactions were below. If your report returns a low INP, this means your pages is consistently able to respond quickly to all or most user interactions.

Click to learn more about Bidnamic's solution to Google Shopping Management or Bidnamic's superfast, conversion-optimised technology, Bidnamic Discovery Pages.

Keep reading:

• How website speed affects your conversion rate
• Adding structured data to product pages
• Using bid modifiers and dayparting in your campaigns