This is part 2 of a 2-part series on optimizing your main menu for sales and conversion.

In part 1, I showed you exactly what to put in your main menu to optimize sales and conversions in the first part. If you haven't, read it here to increase your revenue in 5 minutes.

In this part 2, I'll show you how to order your main menu using easily collectible data.

Q: How do I optimize my main menu for sales and conversions? - Part 2

How to order your main menu

TL;DR of part 1: Always put product categories in your top-level navigation. Don't ever nest your categories in a "Shop" (or "Products," or the like dropdown.

But how do you decide on the order of your categories? And what if you don't have enough space to include all your categories? These are the answers I'll answer now.

"Why should I order my categories in a specific way?" you might even ask. Studies show that employees increase the amount of salad on their plates when you put salad first in the canteen buffet. Similarly, you can nudge your online store visitors towards more revenue per session by ordering your top-level navigation the right way.

But how do you order? The obvious one is by revenue. However, revenue's problem is that one category can generate more revenue than another but still have a lower revenue per session (RPS). So if you could increase the number of sessions for that category, you could increase revenue. However, a category can have the highest RPS but only have a few sessions. Think winter jackets. They are most likely a high RPS category during winters, but not a category with many sessions overall. In other words, less interest but highly converting when the interest is there. Do we want to nudge our visitors towards that? Maybe during specific periods, but not as a general rule of thumb.

Therefore, I prefer to use click data. And to do so, I use Hotjar. Hotjar lets you generate heatmaps of what users do on your website pages - where they click, where they pit their cursor, and how far they scroll. Here's an example of a Heatmap of the navigation on one of my brands:

The redder, the more visitors click the item. Notice the blue spots below the second-to-last category "Andet" (means "other"). These appear because it's a dropdown menu, so users click below the top-level item.

In Hotjar, you can hover on each spot and see exact click-data like below.

So Hotjar gives you a complete data-set of clicks that you can use to order your menu items. And you can use this to order your menu items based on which gets the most clicks.

Tip: If you already have Hotjar installed, you don't have to create a new, manual heatmap to get this. Just go to "Continuous heatmaps," select the "All pages containing" filter and write your top-level domain (yourshop.com) in the search bar and click "View Heatmap."

This gives you a decent heatmap of your navigation if you haven't made any significant changes to your menu in your time selection.

What to leave out

As you might have noticed in the heatmaps, I have an "Others" category on our sites. I have too many categories to show them all without multiple linebreaks, so I focus on my best and most seasonally relevant categories and put the rest in the "Others" category.

So combine your business knowledge and the click data to determine if you should put some categories in an "Others" menu.

But remember: If you can fit all, do it.

Godspeed,

Mathias