 "How To Optimise Product Detail Pages (PDPs) To Improve Conversion")
When it comes to improving conversion on an eCommerce site, many teams instinctively look to the checkout or basket. But in my experience, there’s a more critical (and often overlooked) page in the journey: the Product Detail Page, or PDP.
With more and more brands investing in marketing campaigns across Performance Max, paid shopping ads, and social commerce, the Product Detail Page (PDP) has become one of the most important landing pages in the eCommerce journey. Yet, in my experience, it’s often one of the least optimised.
While many teams instinctively focus on the homepage or checkout to boost performance, the PDP is where a large majority of shoppers drop off. We assume a high level of intent once a user reaches this page – but assumption isn’t a strategy. If your PDP doesn’t support your proposition and guide users to the next step with confidence, you’re missing a critical opportunity.
Why PDPs are so crucial within your customers' journey.
The PDP is a place where a customer pauses before they make a decision to engage deeper with the purchase process and press the add-to-cart or buy now button. It’s where they assess the product in detail, read reviews, weigh up the price, and look at the images. It’s also where doubt creeps in and questions start to form:
Is this product right for me?
Do I really need this?
Will it fit/work/suit my needs?
Can I trust this brand?
A well-optimised PDP will go some way to eliminate that doubt, reinforcing the decision-making process and making it easy for the customer to continue with confidence.
Prioritising add-to-cart as our key metric.
While conversion rate is often the headline metric, it’s the add-to-cart action that matters most at the PDP. Optimisations here should first and foremost be measured by their impact on add-to-cart rate, unless of course we're focused on nano conversions, perhaps with wishlist or data capture.
Start by analysing your current add-to-cart rates by device, traffic source, and product category. Benchmark these, then set realistic targets for improvement. For many, improving this metric by as little as 1-2% can deliver a substantial impact.
Look to best practices that are tried & tested.
There are well-established UX and CRO practices that consistently improve PDP performance. Here are some of my go-tos when optimising a PDP:
Sticky or floating add-to-cart buttons. Especially on mobile, where users scroll more and CTAs can disappear quickly off-screen. Keeping the button and price accessible can have a significant uplift on conversion.
Visual hierarchy. Make the product name, price, and CTA the most prominent elements. Use clear points for key benefits.
Multiple images and video. Include high-res images, zoom functionality, lifestyle shots, and, where possible, short-form video to show the product in use.
Trust signals. Display customer reviews, ratings, returns policy, and delivery information. I've found these elements, if not already in place, take a backseat on most backlogs. But to a prospective customer and your PDP they are hugely important. Read more on optimising product copy.
Stock & dispatch messaging. It sounds simple, but highlighting a product as in stock and ready for dispatch is a great driver to improve the ATC rate. It provides a level of reassurance to your prospective customer that it's likely to be dispatched quickly with short lead times.
Urgency messages. Displaying messages like "Low Stock" or "Selling Fast" to nudge faster decisions is a great approach for a limited or high-demand product, but it's important to use this wisely and ensure that it's authentic and true. Read more on creating a sense of urgency and increasing conversions.
Reducing cognitive load.
Displaying too much information at once causes indecision. A PDP should guide, not overwhelm. A simple UI design practice is to group similar content together, such as product description, delivery info, size guides, and it's a common practice across most eCommerce websites. Avoid long paragraphs. Keep it simple.
We've all undoubtedly experienced a good PDP that feels clean, fast, and reassuring. I guess we could think of it as a salesperson with great product knowledge who knows when to talk and when to let the customer explore.
Optimise for mobile experience.
With mobile traffic often accounting for over 60% of eCommerce sessions, your mobile PDP experience needs to be truly on point.
Button sizes and areas of interaction need to be easily clickable, making use of accordions or panels for long-form content to avoid overwhelming the screen and prioritise speed. Slow product pages will have an impact on conversion. Commonly, we’ll want to show our products in the best light, with high-resolution images and video, so it's important to deliver this with best practice in mind by compressing images and eliminating unnecessary scripts.
Personalise, personalised & personalise.
I’m a huge advocate of the age-old saying “Right product, Right Message, Right Time”, and this is so true for our PDPs, a great one doesn’t treat every visitor the same, but instead it's curated, tailoring its content through customer insight. Whilst this may sound like utopia, there are techniques that we can use broadly against segments and groups of customers, things like:
Personalised recommendations. I’m a huge advocate of a segmented recommendation strategy, optimising which products are shown based on the user's intent, basket contents, and previous purchases, is a solid approach that supports growth in average order values. They can also be key in developing onward journeys for out-of-stock products or products at varying price points.
Dynamic messaging. This is a great method of highlighting key points based on the referring channel. For example, returning to our Performance Max campaigns and arrival at the PDP may not highlight core offers or brand messaging that only resides on your homepage - this means many potential shoppers are simply not seeing it.
Intention-based pop-ups. One of my biggest bugbears is aggressive landing page popups, you know the ones that say “Great, you're here! Have 10% Off!!!” and again, just because it's lazy, little thought has been given to the user and what their intention is. By triggering pop-ups intentionally based on behaviour and applying tailored content, it can provide additional reassurance to the user, encourage them to purchase or, when required, move into an alternative conversion like data capture.
Track the right metrics & iterate.
Not having annotations available in Google Analytics 4 is so irritating, but that aside, it's important to track every change you make. Keeping a spreadsheet is a simple approach to log the date, time, page type, url and description of the change made. It's also good practice to drop in a benchmark for the metric that you’re hoping to influence, simply as a quick reference when carrying out future analysis.
If you don’t know, ask…
It's usual for the best insights not to come from your analytics tools, but directly from your customers. Where possible, consider contextual feedback; adopting a “Was this page helpful?” at the bottom of your PDP will provide great insight into what’s missing.
Reading reviews, customer service queries and running Pareto analysis across common features will provide trends, patterns and focus areas for improvement.
So, are we going to press “add-to-cart”?
Optimising product detail pages isn’t about reinventing the wheel or thinking up the next best, greatest and most amazing approach. It's all about consistency, sweating out the details, measuring what matters (like add-to-cart rate), and creating a page that provides an experience that builds confidence and reduces friction. I’ve seen PDPs described as a silent salesperson in a few articles across the web, and I actually believe that’s a pretty concise explanation.
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