Contentsquare’s latest report revealed a drop in website traffic, consumption and conversions — even as digital advertising expenditures are poised to surpass $740 billion this year. The report also showed progress on the mobile app front even as consumers found the experience frustrating.
“While fixing frustrations remains an utmost priority across industries, efforts to optimize mobile app performance are paying off, with apps recording steady customer engagement in 2023 (14 pages viewed per session up from 13.8 the previous year) and a conversion rate of 5.6 percent — three-times the conversion rate of mobile web traffic,” the report’s authors said, adding that mobile app users are spending 64 percent more time in-app than visitors spend on mobile sites.
The research also showed that despite mobile driving 70 percent of website traffic, “browsing time on mobile web is 60 percent shorter than on desktop,” Contentsquare said, adding that these “’micro-visits’ contribute to a decline in conversion rates, highlighting the gap between consumer expectations and current mobile web optimization practices.”
Overall, the report found that 55 percent of all sites experienced lower traffic while 58 percent had a consumption drop and 5.5 percent had a decrease in conversion. Contentsquare also said that 40 percent “of all site visits included avoidable friction, including slow page loads and rage clicks.”
Jean-Christophe Pitié, chief marketing and partnerships officer at Contentsquare, said with a drop in global web traffic this year and the cost per visit rising almost 10 percent, it is critical to make every website visit count.
“We know from our previous consumer research that shoppers are leaving sites as a result of frustrations that could be easily resolved, such as slow page loads and rage clicks,” Pitié said. “Mobile, in particular, is the new competitive battlefield. We’ve seen gains in terms of engagement for apps this year, but mobile optimization as a whole is not as mature as it could be given the intelligence, we have today on customer behaviors and preferences.”
Klarna launches ‘Sign in with Klarna’
Klarna’s latest AI-driven service streamlines online purchases and disrupts the global verification industry with a solution that offers consumers control over their data while providing personalized shopping experiences.
“Sign in with Klarna” is designed to give consumers an overall smoother shopping experience. “The service saves time for consumers by fast-tracking the online purchase process and, if they consent to sharing their data, unlocks personalized offers from merchants,” the company said.
Klarna said the service is now available in 23 countries, including the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand, among others.
The rollout follows successful testing in Sweden with the restaurant app Maitres and marketplace Tradera. Klarna said after just a few months, “the service has become the second most popular login method on Tradera, with 20 percent of the total social logins demonstrating its usability and ease.”
Stefan Öberg, chief executive officer at Tradera, said the marketplace immediately gets a complete profile “with just a couple of clicks from the consumer, whereas similar services from Apple, Facebook, and Google create a profile that the customer needs to complete since it lacks information such as address and phone number.”
Öberg said the vast majority of Swedes already use Klarna, “and the new login service thus significantly simplifies registration for the majority of our customers.”
The launch of “Sign in with Klarna” is a direct challenge to dominant U.S. tech giants, Klarna said, adding that Apple and Google’s elimination of third-party cookies “has made it harder for payment services to automatically fill in customer details to speed the online checkout.” Klarna said the new solution “solves this for both consumers and merchants and presents a challenge to tech giants Apple, Facebook, and Google in the global verification industry – which is expected to almost double in size from $10.16 billion today to $18.12 billion by 2027.”
Raji Behal, head of Western and Southern Europe at Klarna, said the with new login solution, “we add another dimension to improving the customer journey for consumers and our offering towards merchants.”
“We give consumers control over their own data, making it easy for them to choose what to share with stores for a more personalized shopping experience,” Behal said. “The product has enormous growth potential, and we believe that it will become as familiar a feature in global online retail as our payment solutions in the near future.”
Installment plans are a hit
A new study by Splitit and Pymnts has found that general-purpose credit card installment plans are a reliable way to increase sales and improve customer satisfaction. The report “Divided, Not Conquered: Acquirer and Merchant Confusion Clouds Split-Payments Landscape” found that 78 percent of merchants intend to improve, or are currently improving, their ability to accept these payments.
“Fewer declined transactions and faster processing times are two of the benefits to card-attached installments cited by 48 percent of the merchants surveyed, while 44 percent of the acquirers surveyed cite greater transparency in payment processes,” the report’s authors said. “While nearly one-third of the merchants surveyed believe that consumers will spend more when using general purpose credit card installments, 76 percent of merchants expect the consumers’ use of card-attached installment plans to increase.”
Nandan Sheth, chief executive officer at Splitit, said the data shows that more than three-quarters of merchants surveyed plan to improve their systems due to higher average order values and greater consumer satisfaction. “Although some disconnects between merchants, acquirers and consumers were found in the report, the future is very bright for card-attached installments,” Sheth said. “We know that providing a white-label card-based solution, such as Splitit’s, is appealing to a broad range of highly qualified shoppers with, on average, higher FICO scores and fewer delinquencies overall.”
The research revealed that while 30 percent of merchants polled believe that consumers would prefer to know about their payment options early in the customer journey (before making their purchasing decisions), “more than twice as many shoppers — 66 percent — say that they want to see their payment options before they decide what to buy,” Splitit said adding that just 4 percent of those polled said they even offer a card-based installment plan before checkout.
The report also showed that 100 percent of respondents who want to offer installment plans before checkout “say that this will lead to increased sales, meeting consumer demand, improving customer satisfaction, reducing declined transactions and gaining an advantage over their competitors.”
The poll also showed that 64 percent of consumers who make more than $100,000 a year use installment plans, “challenging assumptions about credit card use and income,” Splitit said.
“Overall, as consumer preferences continue to move toward more flexible payment solutions, merchants and acquirers will need to tailor their split-payment offering mix to meet shoppers’ expectations,” the report stated. “Improving their payment systems to allow for more credit-card based installments, as well as providing greater transparency on payment options earlier in the purchasing journey, will allow merchants to maximize sales and increase customer satisfaction.”
