How to Optimize Your Product Detail Pages
How long does a shopper spend on your product page before moving on?
Retailers keep telling brands to add more images, more video, and more copy to their product detail pages. That advice gets expensive fast when it has to scale across an entire portfolio. Luth Research tracked shopper behavior on product detail pages (PDPs) across Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kroger, and Best Buy to find out which of those assets earn their cost.
More Assets Aren't Always Better Assets
Every added image, video, and block of copy has a cost, and that cost multiplies across a portfolio. Without knowing which assets shoppers respond to, brands end up overspending across the board or guessing at where to cut.
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52 Seconds to Make the Case
Out of a full shopping trip lasting 10 to 15 minutes, shoppers spend just 52 seconds on a PDP on PC and 61 seconds on mobile
Three-fourths of Amazon shoppers land on a relevant PDP, compared to about half of Walmart and Kroger shoppers
Shoppers who watch a product video have longer visits, engage with more parts of the page, and convert at a higher rate
Four Methods, Four Weeks
To get a complete view of the PDP, Luth recruited a few hundred shoppers already in the market for the category and combined four methods over four weeks. Passive tracking captured real usage behavior in the background. Screen recordings, submitted by each participant one to three times during the study, showed exactly how they moved through a product page. A portion of shoppers sat down for 20- to 30-minute interviews that opened with a live screen-recorded shopping session, followed by questions probing why they shopped the way they did. Rounding it out, a short online survey captured offline shopping habits and attitudes the behavioral data couldn't reach on its own.
What Moves the Needle on a Product Page
Images do the heavy lifting early. They're what gets a shopper to keep scrolling or start their search over, and what works differs by category. Some categories need a shopper using the product, others need a text-heavy or 360-degree view.
Copy above the fold matters far more than what's below it. Shoppers in this study spent twice as long reading content above the fold, and since three-fourths of shoppers never scroll far enough to see what's below it, that's no place for important information.
Reviews and Q&A carry weight too: 51% of shoppers use the Q&A section, though the number of reviews and star rating needed to feel credible varies by category. Video sits in an interesting spot. Only 38% of shoppers use it, and they spend just 42 seconds watching, but the shoppers who do watch are more engaged everywhere else on the page.
Get a Retailer-Specific Playbook
The output of this kind of study is a retailer-specific playbook: how many images, whether video is worth it, and what copy and review content each category needs on each retailer's site.
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