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Content Discovery— Are Shoppers Seeing Your Most Valuable Assets?
Not everything on a page matters. Content Discovery is the measure of things that do matter.
Just because an asset is on a page doesn’t mean it’s being discovered. This happens because the page has so many other elements that are screaming for attention.
Why this matters: if a key detail isn’t noticed the shopper will have an incomplete picture and likely not buy.
Content Discovery Explained With an Example
You want a product page that has an 8% conversion rate. So you rip up the old one and build it from scratch– working on every pixel and word.
After 3 weeks of backbreaking work, you have a really good-looking page (using the site below just to make a point, we have no connection with litter robot the company):
You run an A/B test and are shocked to see conversions drop 2%. Our instinct is to immediately revert to the old page.
Does the 2% conversion drop prove the new concept is a dud? Not necessarily. If visitors didn’t discover key elements of the new content how can you conclude the new content is the culprit? It could simply be that the new layout hurt content discovery, and consequently conversions.
The drop in conversions could be a symptom, not the cause.
Analyzing and fixing content discovery is a three-step process.
Step 1: Find Your Centers of Gravity
We assume all page elements matter. Do they really? If we believe everything is important we’ll end up overcommunicating. Remember the shopper is only on the site for 2:32 so we’re fighting against time ⏱️. We need to prioritize.
Is this fighting against time point clear /
Centers of gravity help with prioritization. A center of gravity is content on the page that plays a big role in convincing a shopper to buy. Let’s understand the center of gravity idea by revisiting the Litter Robot example.
On that page, I identified 5 centers of gravity (these are my most important marketing assets):
A:
At the top of the description, the brand states their cat litterbox is used by 750,000 cat parents (see text in the image below):
This is a powerful social proof element. Is this possible that mobile page visitors are blowing past without noticing that number? It’s mentioned just once on the page. If true, it would greatly disadvantage our sales pitch.
B:
There is a really good product demonstration video but how many miss it as they scroll rapidly?
C:
The Q&A section is important:
This is where shoppers go to get answers to their questions. But this mobile page is long and this element appears on scroll 7. It’s also competing with the reviews call-to-action:
D:
Customer-submitted photos of their cats using the litterbox are important:
Seeing customer submitted photos of their cats using the product is more convincing than seeing the beautiful lifestyle photos shown on the product page.
But if people aren’t seeing this element it will not generate the conversion impact we hope to have.
E:
Finally, we know reviews matter.
The more reviews you have the better. This graph is a broad eCom study and shows how review counts and conversion rates are correlated:
You might think reviews are unmissable on an eCom product page. After all, online shoppers are trained to seek out reviews. How surprised would you be if I told you that in our experience (because we track this stuff) under 20% of page visitors actually scroll down to the reviews section?
Now that we’ve identified our 5 centers of gravity we’re ready for step 2.
Step 2: Add Discovery Trackers
Peter Drucker said, “[only] what gets measured, gets managed.” That applies to our situation.
A discovery tracker is a piece of javascript code that lets me know if a center of gravity was discovered. As a marketer, I need that intel.
Here are a few ways in which I would add trackers to the page. We said above that the 750,000 units sold number was important. Here’s how I’d tracking to it.
I’d update it to this (notice the Reveal button in the screenshot below):
When clicked, we’ll show this:
Because I am tracking clicks to the Reveal button I will now know if that 750,000 number is seen because it’s only revealed when clicked.
We also said this video was important:
So I’d add video play tracking. Now I know how many watched the video. If I expected 20% of mobile visitors to watch the video and only 12% did I can make the video more visible by converting it onto a conditional element (explained in the next section).
We also said Q&A content was important.
If we had tracking for people who clicked Q&A (787) we’d know if that content was visible enough. If the data revealed it wasn’t very visible we’d convert this into a conditional element (explained below).
Step 3: Convert an Element Into a Conditional Element
By converting a page element into a conditional element you are ensuring the shopper is reminded about it if it’s missed.
Let’s describe a conditional element functionality by revisiting the Litter Robot example. In point A: above we talked about adding a Reveal button to reveal the 750,000 number:
Say someone is distracted and doesn’t see this Reveal button. If they miss the Reveal button it means they also missed seeing the 750,000 number.
When that happens I will repeat that 750,000 number lower on the page. This time I’ll show it as a banner so it stands out more:
There is a lot more to say about conditional elements. We even have a conditional element case study, which you can find in this article: Conditional Elements.
Revealing It All
We hope you liked this product page content discovery article.
But we have so much more to share with you.
Why Listen to Us?
We’ve spent all our time in our marketing lab, experimenting with online shoppers. We’ve learned a crap ton and are ready to share those learning.
What we’ve learned is that the real secret to growing sales is to ignore 84% of your site visitors so you can triple down on a very special group. We call this group Healthy Skeptics. 👈🏼 click the link to your left for an unfair advantage over the competition.
