Secrets of Profitable Site Navigation Exposed

By Larry Kavanagh

Track the percentage of shoppers who start carts. If shoppers aren't starting carts, that usually means your navigation or merchandising is off. A "good" number here varies tremendously depending on the nature of your site and the type of traffic it attracts.
Track this metric over time for different sources of traffic and types of shoppers, particularly direct visitors, paid and organic search-driven visitors, and first-time and repeat visitors. Use it to find opportunities to optimize navigation, product selection and presentation.
Landing page bounce rate is the percentage of shoppers leaving your site after viewing only one page. As with carts started, a good number for this metric varies tremendously by the type of shopper. In general, a rate below 25 percent for first-time shoppers indicates you're doing well, while repeat visitors should be below 15 percent.
The percentage of shoppers using site search reflects the effectiveness of your navigation. You're probably thinking, "What an idiot. The shoppers who use site search are among my highest converting. I want more shoppers to use site search."
The problem is that many people never even use search, opting to leave a site if the navigation fails. If your search rate is creeping up, you're probably losing cruise ship-loads of shoppers who aren't bothering to attempt to search for a product.

Larry Kavanagh is founder and CEO of multichannel solutions provider DMinSite (lkavanagh@dminsite.com).