E-commerce Conversion Audit

Additional traffic creates more opportunities. The experience after the click determines how well the site can use them.

Follow one customer journey from advert to order

Choose a commercially important product and follow the route a customer would take.

Does the landing page match the advert’s product, offer and price? Is the advertised variant available? Are any conditions clear?

For Shopping campaigns, review the consistency of product data and landing-page information, including price and availability. Google’s product data specification sets out the applicable requirements. Google Merchant Center product data specification

Record each point where a visitor needs to search elsewhere for a basic answer.

Help the customer make a product decision

Useful product content explains suitability.

Depending on the category, customers may need dimensions, compatibility, materials, fit, maintenance, installation requirements or a comparison with alternatives.

Read recent customer questions and returns reasons where available. They can reveal uncertainty that polished product copy has missed.

Place important information close to the decision it supports. Delivery costs buried in a separate page are less useful to someone deciding whether to add a product to their basket.

Test the purchase journey on a phone

Complete the journey on an actual mobile device.

Check variant selection, quantity controls, basket updates, delivery choices, payment options and validation messages. Include an unavailable variant and an incorrectly completed field.

Look for problems such as:

Controls obscured by banners or overlays.
A selected variant changing unexpectedly.
Charges appearing later than customers expect.
Error messages that do not explain how to proceed.
Product information becoming difficult to read.
A failed transaction leaving the next step unclear.

Record the device, page and exact steps needed to reproduce each issue.

Check measurement before drawing conclusions

Compare the purchase records used by the business with the events used in analytics. Investigate duplicate transactions, missing orders and inconsistent revenue definitions.

Document whether reported revenue includes tax, delivery, discounts and refunds. Keep those definitions consistent when comparing performance.

Conversion rate should also be reviewed with context. Traffic source, device, product mix and the balance between new and returning customers can change the overall figure.

Use funnel arithmetic to frame the opportunity

Consider an illustrative funnel:

1,000 product-page sessions.
100 sessions with an add-to-basket action.
50 sessions reaching checkout.
30 sessions resulting in a purchase.

That is a 3% session purchase rate. The sequence helps identify stages to investigate, but does not explain why visitors leave.

Use observation, customer feedback and suitable analysis to form a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis where traffic and implementation allow a meaningful comparison.

If a change is followed by more purchases, check for other explanations such as a promotion or a different traffic mix before attributing the improvement to that change.

Prioritise by consequence and evidence

Fix a reproducible checkout failure promptly. Evaluate a proposed layout improvement according to the evidence behind it, the number of customers affected, implementation effort and the ability to measure the result.

Assess orders commercially too. Higher revenue can coincide with deeper discounts, more returns or a less profitable product mix.

Peach & Stone connects paid acquisition with the buying journey and the commercial outcome, so campaign decisions reflect what happens after the click.

Next step: Choose your five most important products and audit the mobile journey from advert to order. Start with the issues that prevent a confident purchase.