After the home page the most popular landing pages for Supercircuits (one of the online stores I run) are the category pages.

While they are well optimized for SEO, since I joined the company I've wanted to make them more like landing pages — jumping off points from which to explore our products.

I finally had a chance to start making some moderate improvements to our security cameras page; namely adding the product sub-categories to the main body of the page instead of them solely being accessible via the left hand navigation.

Here's how the category page looked before:

And here's how it looks after adding the sub-categories to the main area:

Please bear in mind that this was a quick test to see if making changes to the page would have any effect on bounce rate.

The good news is that in the month since the changes have been in effect, bounce rate has gone down from around 35% to 28% — a 20% reduction.

Here's how it looks in Google Analytics:

Of course, it doesn't take a genius to point out that the original page design was not very appealing to visitors and didn't help with orienting new visitors to the page.

However, it's interesting to note that just pulling out the product sub-categories from the left hand navigation and into the main area of the page significantly reduced bounce rate.

Next steps are to improve the design and add more landing page-like features such as product offers, featured items, etc. That will probably have to wait, though, as we're moving to a new e-commerce platform and a new site design (can't wait!).

Posted on: April 26, 2011 | 10 Comments

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