Conversion Funnel Analysis
Visitors are people they are unprediictable, fickle and often illogical. They do not view your site as a linear process its a series of micro decisions. When a user comes to your site they may at first be checking your company out to make sure you are bona fide and reliable. Once they are satisfied they might explore your product catalogue and look at some product detail pages. At this stage they may even leave the site and do some comparison shopping or even visit a store.
Once they have decided that they want to buy your product they may revisit your site and check up on delivery costs and your returns policy they may even go back to look at other products may be thinking about a multiple purchase.
The Buying Process
Finally a decision to purchase is made and the user may jump into your buying process which may be a more linear process but may at some point return to the product catalogue to check on a detail or take a look at delivery costs again. At some point the visitor will complete payment and become a paying customer.
A conversion funnel is therefore more like a series of tornados where visitors leap from one tornado to another as they move from researching retailers, to research shopping to purchasing. At any one of these stages the user can jump back into research mode or even abandon your site altogether.
Conversion Funnels are Like Tornados
Each tornado contains groups of pages that visitors visit and this needs to be reflected in a conversion funnel analysis.
Progression from page to page is the most important metric and you should aim to measure the degree to which any page in a page group contributes to progression. If only 10% of visitors who visit the Delivery Costs page progress to the Purchase stage then you should consider making this page more persuasive.
Persuasive Campaigns
Different types of visitors behave in different ways you must be able to define segments and compare them with in the conversion funnel. For instance you might want to compare visitors you enter your site via a pay per click campaign with those that click through from an email marketing campaign. This type of analysis can tell you a great deal about the persuasiveness of campaign landing pages.
Analysing your site in this way will help you develop an optimum expereince for the user - you may even want to experiment with different marketing personas and try to anticipate what information they will reuqire at different stages in your buying process to ensure they have the confidence to close the purchase.
One web analytics solution that is particularly good at conversion funnel analysis is Clicktracks we suggest you take a look at their site ClickTracks Web Analytics or see Clicktracks demos here.
Reading Material
Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results by Bryan Eisenberg