Fewer people are visiting retail brands’ websites, and when they do, they are not staying as long, according to an insights report recently published by Contentsquare. 

Based on an analysis of 90 billion user sessions covering 389 billion page views across 6000 websites, the report focuses on the customer experience journey from initial acquisition to long-term retention. One of the top-line takeaways is that a series of small shifts is reshaping the customer experience. The report lays bare the steep decline in owned and organic traffic, how the traffic mix is shifting and the resulting impact on acquisition costs and spending.

Jean-Christophe Pitié, Paris-based CMO and chief partner officer at Contentsquare, talked to Amie Larter, CEO of Inside Retail’s publisher Octomedia, about some of these trends, in a podcast recorded during Shopify in Las Vegas last week.

He explains that CMOs working in retail are describing a “perfect storm” right now. Overall internet traffic is falling by around 3.3 per cent, with retail down 5 per cent. A growing proportion of consumers are spending more time on social media such as TikTok and Meta channels, and there has been a huge shift from desktop to mobile, which also impacts traffic.

Meanwhile, with more people on social media, paid social traffic is growing – and paid social has a lower conversion rate than paid search. This has led to a 19 per cent increase in the cost of customer acquisition for a retailer during the past two years. “That’s a lot. We have qualitative feedback to show a shift to paid,” says Pitié.

“All these small changes are shifting the customer experience and the traffic landscape. We call it a butterfly effect because you can’t pinpoint really one single change; it’s the sum of these small changes that are making the massive impact we’re seeing on traffic or conversions.”

Attention spans are falling

Furthermore, Contentsquare’s report reveals that session depth, dwell time and scroll rates are falling.

Firstly, retailers have been talking about the shift from desktop to mobile for a decade, but it’s now really happening, and the consumer attention span on mobile is much shorter than on a laptop, he says. 

For luxury consumer brands, 80 per cent of the traffic is now coming from mobile, representing what he terms as “a structural shift”, which explains why consumption is declining.  

Secondly, brands are still experiencing many new visitors, suggesting they are not doing enough with returning customers. New visitors shop around, and they have a shorter attention span.  

Thirdly, more and more traffic is being directed straight to Product Detail Pages (PDPs), which is good because you have more specific product information on them, but there is a danger in directing visitors to the product pages too quickly. He likens it to walking into a retail store and getting drawn to the checkout when many customers want to wander around the store and browse. “Again, it’s a balance. But that’s one reason why we’re seeing engagement going down.

“I call it a revenue drain or the silent killer. You’re spending a lot of money to get all these customers to come, and then they leave.”

In other words, while retailers are acquiring them, they are not keeping them. “It’s throwing good money after bad money. That’s why we call it the silent killer.”

He says visitors are frustrated by pages that take anything longer than three seconds to load. Those and display errors still haunt as many as 40 per cent of user experiences. 

“Customer expectations are rising. You and I have different expectations now than 10 years ago.”

Contentsquare’s report showed that conversions fell 6.1 per cent across digital. “It’s a crisis,” says Pitié. “It’s a little bit scary.” 

To optimise conversions, Pitié advises companies to be sure to deliver very fast load times on their sites and remember the old maxim ‘retail is detail’.  

Pay attention to the PDPs, he continues, and ensure you make the most of your data. “Probably the most important one is segmentation. Segment your data between returning customers and new customers who want more personalisation. Don’t land them too fast on the checkout or product pages.”

Understanding customer behaviour is key

Pitié recently spoke with the CMO of a high-end luxury brand who told him he spends one afternoon a month watching session replays of customers browsing on his website, trying to understand how customers were experiencing his brand. “He told me, ‘I’m selling $30,000 watches, so I don’t have that much traffic. So, every experience has to be amazing. I need to delight the customer. It’s detailed’. So focus on speed, and focus on detail.”

Within brands, teams need to work together to achieve excellence, he says. “There’s no overarching issue. There’s no easy solution. It’s no revolution. It’s a journey.”

He counsels following the example of the luxury brand CMO: Watch user sessions with your team and try to see what can be improved. “In a multidisciplinary company, it’s getting everyone coming together, thinking about the customer experience – your IT people, your data team, your marketing team, the  business team – bring them all together to look at the same data.”

Pitié cites The North Face in the US – “an amazing experience” – and luxury European brands such as Louis Vuitton and Dior as examples of retail brands getting it right online. There are lessons retailers in general can learn from them. 

“[These brands] are very focused on omnichannel consistency, so we really listen to them because they know customers. They switch back and forth between the channels. The second thing is they are bringing together all these teams with different KPIs: Marketing, product experience, IT, data, having all of these teams working together is critical.”

Thirdly, he says, they are using a great analytics tool, like ContentSquare, to get the data and insights to fix problems and elevate the consumer experience online, whether for new visitors or returning customers. 

• Listen to the podcast to hear Pitié talk about how paid search is going to evolve thanks to the new Large Language Model (LLM) and Gen AI technology developments currently emerging, the trend away from Google Search to ChatGPT and why they will be both an opportunity – as a new source of traffic – and a threat.