How City Grounds transformed its Shopify collection pages to get +34% lift in RPV with blend of lifestyle images and personalized recommendations
UNIQUE INSIGHT: Mobile shoppers are highly unlikely to engage with navigation, search, or filtering features of the collection pages – use of lifestyle images in combination with personalized recommendations delivers 404% lift in mobile paid traffic revenue per visit.
About City Grounds
City Grounds was inspired by and caters to the urban cycling lifestyle. As this exciting global movement continues to grow and progress, City Grounds is dedicated to providing customers with quality merchandise and impeccable service through our knowledgeable staff.
They are constantly seeking out fresh and innovative merchandise from around the world to satisfy all of your urban cycling needs and more. They are not just a bike shop, they are lifestyle retailer. Beyond bicycles and components, they also carry a variety of functional streetwear and active lifestyle apparel, books, DVDs, and accessories.
Before
During pandemic City Grounds was forced to close their brick-and-mortar store and to go fully-online, which triggered a redesign of their Shopify Plus store.
While redesigning their site, they decided to up the game and add advanced personalization capabilities. With more than 3,500 product in their catalog it was critical to help online shoppers easily discover desired products while introducing them to related items, like apparel that matched the bike.
CHALLENGES WITH COLLECTION PAGES
On the marketing side of the house they were spending a significant amount of money on paid advertisement driving potential buyers to collection pages. A majority of paid traffic visitors were mobile shoppers that significantly underperformed desktop visitors.
As visualized below, City Grounds collections pages look like any other collection pages on any other Shopify site.
The key usability assumption is that visitors will use filtering and sorting options to more easily discover a product of interest in a very large grid of available products.
Desktop
Mobile
After
Obviyo Recommend, powered by the same algorithms that are driving personalized recommendations on Amazon, was select because of its unique ability to personalize product discover experience for online stores with a large product catalog.
Obviyo app become a part of the new site from the day one delivering strong results with days from its launch. For example, during the first of running there was a +323% in RPV between visitors who engaged with personalized recommendations and those who did not, indicating that recommendations were highly relevant and effective.
TRANSFORMATION OF COLLECTION PAGES
To experiment and innovate new collection page design, a limited number of collection pages used as paid advertisement landing pages were transformed.
Obviyo’s Growth Bots, ready-to-go intelligent content blocks that blend branded lifestyle images with highly personalized product recommendations, are used to replace conventional collection page grids and its sorting and filtering features.
Lifestyle images are introduced to inspire buyers and to differentiate the offering.
Instead of expecting that shoppers will filter-sort-find a product of interest, each block ‘auto-magically’ personalizes a list of products and adapts in real time to different audiences with different product needs.
Desktop
Mobile
Results
Since both the conventional collection pages and the new versions used as landing pages were in play at the same time, there was a unique opportunity to compare and analyze the results produced by two different types of collection pages.
Knowing that the makeup of visitor traffic is different for different pages, the paid search channel segment was analyzed and used as the common denominator for both collection page styles.
Time interval: 4 weeks
REVENUE PER VISIT (RPV)
All devices – All visitors:
OLD: $4.32
NEW: $5.89
DIFFERENCE: $1.49 (▲ 34%)
Desktop – Paid_Search:
OLD: $9.28
NEW: $11.99
DIFFERENCE: $2.71 (▲ 29%)
Mobile – Paid_Search:
OLD: $2.34
NEW: $11.79
DIFFERENCE: $9.45 (▲ 404%)
UNIQUE INSIGHTS
Personalization and use of blended content to inspire and differentiate offering on collection pages works.
Mobile shoppers are highly unlikely to use filters, sorting, navigation, or search – therefore, providing personalized direct access to products is the only way to create a viable mobile shopping experience.
MERCHANT VALUE
Percentage of mobile shoppers continue to grow mandating better mobile shopping experience in general.
Making collection pages mobile shopper friendly is a new revenue growth opportunity for almost every ecommerce brand.
Next Steps
Growth marketing is a continuous improvement methodology where more data and insights stimulate more growth ‘hacks.’
This study has uncovered the value of replacing conventional filtering and sorting options with hyper personalized recommendations. In particular, it drives 5x higher revenue per visit (RPV) for ever growing cohort of mobile shoppers.
This approach should extend to all collection pages on the site.
However, this transformation should be done gradually and it should be done in a data driven way. Every component of this transformation should be tested to validate if it works across the entire visitor population, and not only for paid search as was the case in this study.