As a successful marketer you’ve now learned how to interpret how visitors behave on your website. If your website handles online retail you are probably tempted to focus your web stats analysis on conversion scenario. This type of analysis is mostly performed on e-commerce websites but it can also be used to measure path to lead conversions from any web page.
Your objective will be to determine why visitors drop from the conversion funnel you’ve created so carefully and to elaborate countermeasures.
Where does a funnel start, where does it end?
A conversion funnel may start from anywhere on your website. The starting point can be the homepage or any advertising landing page. A standard example is presented in the following simple 7 steps scenario of an online retailer:
A visitor…
- Lands on a selected page - at that point the funnel starts.
- Adds a product to his or her shopping cart
- Moves to checkout and places his or her order
- Fills out his or her personal information and address
- Enters his or her credit card
- Clicks to confirm and validate the previously entered information
- Finally confirms and validates the order – at that point the funnel ends.
Your objective at each step is to keep visitors moving up to the next step until the scenario reaches the end of the funnel.
Sounds complicated to setup?
Not really – major web analytics solutions offer integrated conversion scenarios; even the free Google analytics has such capability although the number of steps may be limited. With a little bit of experience you will be able to organize the visitor path which you have decided to track.
Making sense of your own funnel measures
Statistics gathered over a period of time will usually be provided as percentages. For example, between step 3 and 4, usually 25% of all visitors have already dropped the site or have visited another page outside of the pre-determined scenario.
Also, each market segment is specific. You could be provided with industry averages but this would not help you much with you specific needs.
If you are not already benefiting from the help of an experienced web analytics optimization consultant, use you own experience as a buyer.
Most behavior analysis processes should also be narrowed down to more specific segments. Traffic generated through a search engine optimization campaign may not be comparable to paid ads, direct bookmarks or partner referrals.
Adjusting a website to its visitors and involving them into a convincing path to sale often comes down to the basics of understanding human behavior on the internet. Just like your entire website, the whole path must be convincing enough and easy to use to let users reach the ultimate goal.
There is no place for confusion - visitors are merciless when it comes to to closing a computer window and going elsewhere to find what they are looking for Fine-tuning a conversion funnel or scenario requires providing sufficient information to visitors. For example, at any point in time visitors must be informed about where they are in the process, from whom they are about to make a purchase, and eventually, how long the process is going to take.
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