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How important are filters in product catalogs if ecommerce brands want to maximize revenue per visitor? Can using “sticky filters” that stay affixed to the screen at all times make a difference? The answer might surprise you.

Watch this episode of The Cro Show, a game show for conversion rate optimization and marketing experimentation fans, and see if you can guess which test variation performed better during a recent Cro Metrics client experiment.

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Full Transcript:

Bonnie Buchanan: So this company sells premium organic baby and kids clothes, and so we tested two variations on the collection’s or PLP page.

So this was the control, and as you can see, there is a filter on the left hand rail here on desktop.

This was a desktop only test and as you can see, it pretty much just takes up the length of like one tile.

So users are very quickly scrolling past it and very likely missing this and engaging with it far less, so our V1 over here was just making that sticky in the left rail, so it just sticks with users as they scroll down there.

So a fairly simple test to just see if we can boost engagement and enable customers to find what they’re looking for more quickly.

So without further ado, any guesses?

Or I guess I’ll ask for questions first.

Cristi Alvarez: Bonnie, I’m assuming you might have mentioned is this only running on desktop, obviously since it’s like a side rail sticky.

Bonnie Buchanan: Yeah, desktop only.

Ally Kuhn: And do their pages have like pagination? Or is it lazy load?

Bonnie Buchanan: It’s yeah, right. It’s like a lazy load, so you get to the bottom and it’s kind of like the endless scroll.

Cristi Alvarez: Were you tracking metrics wise, any link the clicks within the filter bar as well?

Bonnie Buchanan: Yep, yeah. We had click metrics, engagement metrics for all of the options.

Cristi Alvarez: Alrighty, let’s open it up for people to vote.

So if you think the control won, you’ll put a thumbs down or thumbs down, if you think the variation won you’ll put a thumbs up.

Bonnie Buchanan: So this one was a winner, not a huge, huge winner, but a good winner here, so the biggest change – and what an interesting learning is that engagement with the filters for each option was up like 13 to 19%.

So usage went way up there.

But a kind of interesting learning is that people using the price filter it was less than 1% engagement.

So I feel like they could consider removing that filter altogether.

It just kind of tells us that their customers, you know, they really don’t care about price.

They’re they’re here to buy some premium baby clothes and they’ll pay whatever it takes.

So, yeah, we saw a good 6% lift on revenue and conversion.

Cristi Alvarez: That’s awesome. This is something I’ve been wanting to test with one of our previous clients. Funny.

Bonnie Buchanan: Yeah.

Cristi Alvarez: So this is a great case study.

Bonnie Buchanan: Yeah. And I think some good inspiration for iterations here as well, knowing that the stickiness works and it does lift engagement and that helps with conversion is maybe making it sticky to the top so that once users start scrolling down, it’s at the top.

And then if that can, like open up the the left tile here to create like a four row view that would, we’re hoping that would increase conversion as well.

So that’s the plan.

Cristi Alvarez: Thanks for watching. Be sure to subscribe to have more test ideas sent to your inbox.