The days of succeeding with a static or even manually optimized e-commerce site are long gone.

Successful companies now leverage technologies that automatically optimize monetization and traffic acquisition in response to every click. Every click translates to better customer experiences, which translates to more dollars for you.

Here are seven ways to automatically optimize your site. How many are you using today?

 1.    Search

Great search experiences deliver instant magic for consumers in the form of exceptionally intuitive and relevant search results.

Consumers take this for granted. But merchants must stay vigilant about keeping their most likely margin drivers at the top of all those results queries. Otherwise, they’re not only losing magic, they’re losing money.

Strong e-commerce businesses have search systems that dynamically adjust search rankings based on a combination of keyword relevance and past visitor behavior.

Every time a guest clicks on a search result for a keyword, that’s a signal suggesting the product should be ranked higher for the next visitor who searches for that keyword. The aggregate of those individual clicks is a complex system that evolves dynamically minute to minute.

An automated approach to search optimization uses statistical models to combine aggregated behavior data—based on dozens of signals—with performance metrics to rank results based on their projected yield.

That way, the guaranteed most relevant and highest margin products are always at the top of the list.

2.    UI and Content

Visitor data can also evolve your site’s UI and content automatically.

Most companies now A/B test of course, but few do it as systemically as they could or should. To make the most of your clicks, it helps to have a testing framework that supports multiple UI and content experiments simultaneously. Every click is a vote that will push your site forward, in one direction or another, toward better monetization. If you have five concurrent experiments running, you’re taking 5 steps ahead with every click.

Who has more experiments running right now, you or your competitor?

Dynamic page optimization is another clever and crucial technique. Similar to dynamic search rank optimization, page optimization automatically re-organizes the elements on a page based on aggregate visitor data to increase monetization.

For example, on your product page, should the reviews go above or below the cross-sell module? How many reviews should appear by default?

The optimal configuration might vary by product and it would be impractical to run a separate A/B test for each product. A dynamic page optimization system can automatically choose the best configuration and adjust the page at a product-level.

3.    Recommendation

Amazon is famous for popularizing the “consumers who bought this also bought that” type of data-driven cross-promotion module, and these modules are now a staple of many commerce sites and platforms. With this type of collaborative filtering-based recommendation system, every click is a vote that strengthens the connection between two or more items on your site to improve future recommendations. If a visitor clicks on product A and product B in the same visit, for example, that’s a signal that A and B are connected, and this may make it more likely that product B gets recommended the next time someone views product A.

Your company can always be maximizing the number and type of connections you foster on your site: product to product, product to keyword, keyword to keyword, etc. This creates a strong semantic network that not only improves conversion by aiding in discovery, but also helps search engines make better sense of your content and can lead to better search engine rankings.

4.    Merchandising

How do you stay on top of pricing, discounting, promotions, featured products? By analyzing customer behavior and forecasting demand, your commerce system should be able to automatically identify the products to promote with featured placement, rank boosts, discounts, etc. Sophisticated systems can determine based on click data and unit economics for each product where overall dollar margin can be optimized.

5.    Personalization

Your search, UI, recommendation and merchandising systems can be further optimized based on the past behavior of the current visitor.

With search, for example, even if aggregate behavior suggests that product A is the result most likely to monetize in general for a given keyword, the current visitor may have indicated a preference for a different brand in the past and thus product B may have the highest margin potential for that visitor.

Personalization requires a step up in sophistication of your commerce tools as it involves storing individual customer activity and incorporating that into predictive monetization models in real-time.

However, consumers will increasingly expect personalization as Google, Amazon and other major sites continue to integrate it more deeply into their services.

6.    Keyword Bidding

Your campaign management systems for SEM, PLA, CSE and social channels should be automatically adjusting your keywords, SKUs, targeting attributes and bids to maximize performance. To do this optimally, they need to know how much you stand to make from each visit, and to do that, they need to understand past visitor behavior on the landing pages from these ads. In this sense, every click on your site is a signal for improving your campaigns.

If your traffic acquisition systems are from a different vendor than your monetization systems, the traffic acquisition systems may not have access to enough information to fully optimize your campaigns. With an integrated system, the same data and analytics driving improvements in your monetization systems can be leveraged to make campaign decisions and leverage the benefit you get from each click.

7.    Retargeting

Via retargeting, every visitor who clicks on your site can expand the potential reach of your advertising campaign. But savvy marketers employ sophisticated customer data to improve the effectiveness of the retargeting ads when they are displayed.

A maximally efficient and effective ad retargeting system can serve dynamic, personalized ads offsite by applying the same models used for optimizing UI, recommendation and merchandising onsite.

The clicks on the ads themselves should be leveraged to further improve performance on both your site and retargeting campaigns. As an example, if a visitor clicks on product A on your site, you might then later retarget them with an ad for product A with a cross-sell to product B. If they click on product B in the ad, your system should use that as a signal to improve future cross-sells for product A on your site as well as in retargeting ads.

 

This list isn’t an exhaustive one of course.

But it’s a good starting point for thinking about how much value you’re extracting from each and every click on your site.

Even though most modern commerce systems incorporate at least some data-driven algorithms, be sure to analyze deeply whether there’s more you could be doing with your data. Every click you waste is a lost opportunity to get ahead of the competition. And second order effects compound the benefits (or loss).

The more your monetization improves from every click, the more traffic you can afford to buy, and the more traffic you buy, the more clicks you’ll get.

If we can help you think through your strategy or next opportunity, please let us know, we’re here to help.