Map the Buy Funnel for Fun and Profit
You’ve spent your budget bringing targeted visitors to your website. But what happens when they arrive? Could you be missing that one key element that would help you double your conversion rate? This afternoon’s session Conversions - Mapping the Buy Funnel served as a brief conversion analytics overview and discussion of site factors influencing visitor conversion.
According to Moderator Guy Creese of Ballardvale Research, help is available. There are over 40 analytics tools on the market, with most of them having reached feature parity in the last year. These solutions have grown from tools focused on the needs of IT decision makers to product suites capable of arming the entire corporation with valuable customer insights.
Douglas van Duyne, Senior Director of Customer Experience Products and Design at Keynote Systems, described some of the methods they use to help Fortune 500 businesses refine their online customer experience. You have to figure anyone with a title like that must know what he is doing. Some of this knowledge was chronicled in his recent book, The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience. Among Van Duyne’s recommendations were:
- Focus on content, ease of use, performance, brand value, and customer satisfaction.
- Eliminate distractions that could lead visitors out of the buying process.
- Avoid giving unpleasant surprises such as a high shipping cost revealed deep into the checkout process.
- Address potential deal breakers early in the process.
- Focus on building trust throughout the relationship
Iggy Fanlo of Shopping.com identified three drivers of online sales:
- Brand
- Experience
- and Information—which leads to Trust.
Interestingly, Shopping.com has begun to integrate trust ratings via their Epinions information into the comparison shopping ranking system. Now, the top three listings on the site still go to the highest CPC bidder, but lower rankings are sorted first by “trusted store” status. And, Gray Market products, those originally intended for non-US markets and often sold without a US warranty, are listed below other listings.
Even simple site changes can have dramatic effects on conversion rate. When Shopping.com increased their product image sizes from 75x75 pixels to 100x100, it increased conversions 30 percent.
Michael Behrens of Web Metro, identifies a number of issues you should consider when analyzing the buying funnel:
Pre-Funnel Considerations
- The source of traffic.
- The tracking tools you will use to monitor activity.
- The analytics methods you will employ to understand that traffic.
Buy Funnel Considerations
- Site and company credibility.
- Product value.
- Service/support value
- Guarantee/Warantee value
- Establishment of transactional trust
In practice, Web Metro uses several key metrics to evaluate the performance of client sites. These include the monitoring of exit/dropout rates, overall conversion rates, evaluation of most traveled path vs. desired path, and use of the back button (which often identifies a trouble area). Behrens identified several analytics tools they rely on including Click Tracks, Web Side Story’s HitBox, Net IQ’s Web Trends log analysis software, and their own proprietary ROI tracking system.
Phillip Krim, CEO of Amalgamated Enterprises and a Web Metro client, profiled his experience analyzing and improving the buy funnel of the Sleep Better Store. His initial motivation to act was motivated by something many in this industry might relate to: after a new site launch they discovered what had seemed like a much better design actually did not serve the desires of their customers, leading to a 73 percent homepage drop out rate. They discovered that their customers were already farther into the buy cycle than they anticipated, and were already planning to purchase. So, they re-worked their site to address why the customer should buy from them and conversions improved significantly.
Sometimes the steps to improved conversion are counter-intuitive. 21st Century Insurance found that actually adding steps to the conversion process improved the value of overall returns. By analyzing the dropout rate of each of its nine checkout steps, they found one in particular saw an 85% loss rate. By adding a step to present new options to the customer at that point, overall conversions increased in spite of the longer process.
Surprisingly, only Keynote routinely integrates demographic factors like gender into their site conversion process modeling.
Very good article! Thank you, master!
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