Does an effective layout design means having more products and therefore more links or more copy and therefore a closer match to the 1300 words on page sweet spot?
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This was Derek’s test. We’ve got a situation where in we are seeing in these test environments where we are running a series of e-commerce tests and Derek is spearheading these. We are trying to figure out if there is a better e-commerce platform. What is the right set up? What could you do? What are the best pages just right out of the box when you are using these platforms?
These category pages, they are doing very well. The next question that pops up is how can we make a better category page? I’ve got a category page that is sitting on page 2, what can I do on-page to move it up to page 1?
Should I add more content because these pages are notoriously thin and what are usually sitting on this page are products. Should I just add content – 600, 700, 1000 words?
Should I have more products – should I get another 4 products, 8 products on this page? What would move it up? That is what we did.
We have the category page, specific product page, page with a lot of content added, page with a lot of product added. In this situation, both pages ended up dropping. Neither moved up which was a kind of a drag. I really would have though that the one with more content would move up. It just didn’t.
In talking about this with Derek, he is thinking that we are having trouble with isolating what is actually going on in an e-commerce site because there are so many variables going on. It is really hard to say that adding the content or adding more links, which has caused the drop. It could have been a lot of other things that are going on in these sites.
There are other things that could impact an ecommerce site like having an SSL certificate, the terms you are supposed to have on there, if you are in the UK you have to be very clear about your cookies, and these test sites do not have that. It is possible that they are just not working quite like an e-com site should. We are going to run this again. I encourage you, if you have your own ecom site, this is something worth tinkering around with.
Would adding more products on the page or getting more content on the page do it? One of these things, I think, would have to do it, I would think. But in this initial test, we can’t see it so that is where we are at.