Lesson 1: Creating an amazing experience for first-time visitors

Course content (10 lessons)

When you enter a brick-and-mortar store, the first thing you do is orient yourself with your surroundings so you can find what you came to purchase. The same holds true for people who come to your Shopify store for the first time.

By understanding the difference between how your first-time visitors experience your store and your repeat customers’ experience, you can find ways to optimize for both audiences. In this lesson we’ll explore tools like heatmaps and session recordings to get a visual understanding of the parts of your store that visitors are engaging with most and what areas have little engagement.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Think about the first time you go anywhere, whether it's a brick and mortar store or an online store. You obviously went to that store with a purpose in mind, you're looking for something specific. When you get to your destination, the first thing you do is orient yourself with your surroundings so you can find what you came to the store looking for. The same holds true for people who come to your Shopify store for the first time.
Let's take a look at the experience of a first time visitor. In this example, you can see the main navigation includes an airplane icon. While you're repeat visitors may know exactly what this means, your first time visitors may have no idea what an airplane on a denim site represents when it's actually meant to indicate quick and speedy shipping. By using session recordings, you can see the visitor's mouse moving back and forth over the main navigation, which could indicate they're having a hard time finding what they're looking for.
Let's look at a heat map of this store, which as we covered in previous lessons, is a visual representation of the parts of your site the visitors are most interested in. The more oranges and reds you see over an element in the heat map, the more engagement it's getting from your visitors. In the heat map of this store, we use segmentation to focus specifically on first time visitors, but you could look at other segments like visitors who have been to your site five to nine times or more than 10 times.
Using the heat map, we can see that indeed first time visitors aren't clicking on the airplane graphic in the main navigation. Instead, we see they're using the search bar to find what they're looking for on the store. This indicates they weren't able to find what they were looking for in the navigation and resorted to typing it in the search bar instead. So to fix this, you can update your navigation to make it easier for all visitors-- first time and repeat visitors-- to find what they're looking for with the least amount of friction.
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Lesson 1: Creating an amazing experience for first-time visitors

Course content (10 lessons)

Overview

01 |Module 1: Ways to Discover What Visitors Want to See

02 |Module 2: If they Don’t See It, They Can’t Buy It

03 |Module 3: Stop ‘Em in their Tracks Before they Abandon their Cart

04 |Module 4: Newbie and VIP Visitors: Understand Both to Grow Sales