As the share of traffic on its homepage is increasingly taken up by mobile, backpack and school supplier Jansport redesigned its Web site to be more mobile friendly, generating a 28 percent click-through rate on its mobile homepage.

To do this, the brand enlisted the help of Clicktale, which helped it to redesign its site with a mobile-first philosophy. This was done in an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of mobile and to reach out to younger demographics.

“Through Clicktale, we saw data showing a lot of activity in the navigation, and visitors weren’t making it below the fold,” said Carolina Gomes, director of ecommerce at Jansport. “The fold also broke at a point which made it look like there wasn’t anything below.

“On the top we had a banner that – especially on mobile – was causing a drop-off and people weren’t seeing all the content we had on the homepage.”

Mobile-first
Jansport found that its home page was not up to par with the Web experience of other brands, especially when it came to the mobile side.

The company found that bounce rates were high and people were not interested in interacting with the brand through mobile, an important channel in today’s marketplace.

This was in part due to poor design as well as a lack of features. Jansport enlisted Clicktale to help them diagnose the problem and come up with a better alternative.

“Once we could see how and why visitors were engaging with our site, we changed the homepage design to feature a smaller banner, plus distinct and colorful marketing tiles that rendered above the fold on all devices. Many people are now using these tiles to find backpacks.”

The brand also cleaned up the homepage’s product display, making it easier for consumers to make purchases on mobile.

“Our bounce rate went down and engagement went up because we made homepage gives a clear picture of all products available in the site (more than just a navigation menu), and this was especially important on mobile. For example, our click-through-rate on mobile for the tiles below the banner increased to 28 percent on the new homepage vs 3.5 percent on the old one.”

Changing directions
Now that the homepage looks better on mobile, Jansport will continue to focus on the features it provides as well.

“We look at best practices from a usability standpoint in conjunction with the visitor behavior data we’re seeing in Clicktale as we redesign each part of our site to make the experience as smooth as possible for mobile visitors,” Ms. Gomes said. “We’ve redesigned the home page and now we are working on the checkout, product details pages, product landing pages and search results pages.

“The things we kept in mind for the homepage, for example, is that we wanted our visitors to get an accurate picture of what we have on the entire site, so it was important to feature a diverse selection of primary product categories. We wanted to display a mix of visually featured products and categories, a select part of the top-level navigation, and important information such as free shipping and so on.

“We also use plenty of buttons and arrows to help orient the visitor, whether they’re in a carousel, browsing our best sellers, or looking through the photo gallery.”

While Jansport is happy with the amount of traffic it gets through mobile, the brand is now focused on increasing the number of transactions and revenue generated through mobile.

“Today, traffic on the mobile site accounts for over 55 percent of all visits, but revenues are a different story, accounting for only 35 percent of digital revenue,” Ms. Gomes said. “We see an opportunity to increase mobile conversion significantly. Mobile is our fastest growing group, and we continue to see growth in conversions based on the optimizations we’ve made.

“After we relaunched the redesigned homepage in June, our year-over-year conversions on mobile are up by over 21 percent, and our goal is to continue focusing on that mobile conversion rate. People want to use phones not just to browse but also to purchase, we want to be able to enable both.”