Selling through mobile in E-commerce
E-commerce is one of the fastest growing industries. In 2020, just after the outbreak of the pandemic, due to the closure of most stationary stores, there was a drastic acceleration of online sales growth. Most of the online stores operating so far, have not only doubled but also multiplied their previous revenues. On the wave of the pandemic, there were also many new stores that operate to this day with more or less success. Entities that used to generate most of their sales in showrooms and stationary stores have been forced to emphasize online sales.
From a purely marketing and strategic point of view, we could see that many of the market giants cannot find their way in the new reality. Also, most of the agencies operating on the market dealing with SEO, Google Ads or Facebook Ads, due to the limited number of clients from other industries, “specialized” in E-commerce. However, E-commerce does not forgive mistakes, as it is one of the most demanding industries. Of particular importance here is the rise of mobile sales and related analytics.
As noted by Paweł Maksymiuk, owner of e-commerce agency PROWESO, the increased trend of online shopping entailed a significant increase in the cost of acquiring transactions. According to. According to numerous analytical publications, the average increase in the cost of acquiring transactions in 2020 was nearly 8%. The reason for this state of affairs is the increase in competition – online stores operating so far, wanted to increase their sales even more, while entities, which derived most of their revenue from offline sales, were forced to quickly increase their revenue from online sales. The increase in CPC and CPM rates has made optimizing the cost of acquiring a transaction, and the associated analytics, even more important.
Another phenomenon we could see was the progressive increase in the number of sessions generated through mobile devices. For many stores, nearly 70% of traffic is already mobile.
So what many marketers and “e-commerce specialists” started to do? Limit or completely exclude traffic that inherently has a lower e-commerce conversion rate, namely mobile traffic. Others, in order not to underestimate the reported conversion in Google Analytics statistics, limited their mobile activities to remarketing.
It’s clear that analytics and attribution in the case of users who change frequently, browse. In the standard implementation, we do not cope well with the standard implementation. In a standard implementation, not even Google Analytics, which is the basis for many marketing decisions. Even after the launch of Google Signals, we get data on a small part of the traffic in many cases. It becomes necessary to implement non-standard implementations of Google Analytics, using “User ID” function, using other analytical tools and developing own models. Limiting advertising or, generally speaking, traffic from mobile devices, is a huge mistake, significantly decreasing store revenues and ultimately increasing the cost of acquiring transactions.
It would seem that claims that mobile doesn’t sell are long gone. However, as practice shows, in many corporations there is still an approach, attributing transactions to the last interaction of the user with the online store. Note that a characteristic of mobile traffic is that it is often a traffic that initiates the shopping process, as well as one in which there are more user sessions before the final purchase decision.
As the owner of an e-commerce agency operating for nearly 14 years, I realize how difficult it is to build an appropriate model of traffic sources and user path, analytics and optimization of transaction acquisition costs. At the same time, given the numerous examples, I know that the effort put into analytics more than pays off.
