Do you have great numbers of well qualified traffic coming to your
website but disproportionately low numbers of sales?
How about paid registrations? We have worked with a
number of customers who have the same issue. Upon reviewing
their websites there doesn't appear to be anything wrong
at first glance. The sites look professional, have nice
graphics, seem to load well and work the way they're
supposed to. The copy is well thought out, the content
is well targeted and the sites have good unique selling
propositions. On top of all that the offers are backed
by 100% guarantees along with testimonials from satisfied
customers smattered throughout the pages. So what on
earth is wrong? Why do we see websites with ridiculously
low sales conversion rates at often less than 0.5%?
Getting higher than 0.5% sales conversion rate
A well thought out website might hit 0.5% or higher
anyway without any extra work. More often than not however
problems exist within a process which forces the majority
of visitors to work harder than they want to. It really
is that simple. If you want to improve your conversion
rates you need to find out which processes or steps
are causing the problems before people can actually
convert i.e. buy or register. By measuring how people
use your website in particular the common scenarios
and paths they follow then you can start to figure out
what your problems are.
Introducing the web scenario
Most decent web measurement systems these days allow
you to set-up a scenario that is likely to be frequently
used by your website visitors. Take a typical shopping
cart scenario. Your visitor might arrive at your campaign
landing page then add one of your products to his shopping
cart. After this the ideal scenario for you is for the
visitor to continue by filling in his credit card details
and confirming his purchase. This means you might have
a scenario which follows this path through your website.
Page 1) product_landing_page.php
Page 2) add_to_cart.php
Page 3) review_order.php
Page 4) add_details.php
Page 5) purchase_success.php
What typically happens is that people arrive in large
numbers at page one but only a small percentage end
up at page 5. This is a process and it's what needs
to be measured to find out where people are leaving
from the website. If you can determine where and how
people leave your shopping cart process (also called
shopping cart abandonment) then you can attempt to do
something about it.
Shopping cart
abandonment
Let's assume that you have a similar process to the
one described above and you have a measurement system
that allows you to see how many people visit each page.
In two of our recent cases we have seen statistics which
resembled these figures.
Step 1) product_landing_page.php 10,000
visits.
Step 2) add_to_cart.php 8000 visits (20%
abandon)
Step 3) review_order.php 240 visits (97%
abandon)
Step 4) add_details.php 120 visits (50%
abandon)
Step 5) purchase_success.php 40 visits (66%
abandon)
Let's examine those figures in a little bit more detail.
Firstly 10,000 visitors arrive at the landing page.
About 20% of those visitors leave from the landing page
without adding anything to the shopping cart. From the
remaining 8000 who added the product to the cart only
240 have gone one step further and reviewed the order
(3% of the remaining 8000). After that a further 50%
left the process when you asked them to give you their
credit card details and a further 66% have bailed out
at the last point. This means that from a potential
10,000 purchases you have only 40 buyers. A pitiful
0.4% conversion rate.
Examine the biggest bail out rate
Suddenly you can see why even though large numbers of
traffic have arrived at your landing page only a small
percentage buy and the biggest problem is because of
one part of the process between step 2 and step 3. If
you can reduce the number of people leaving at this
point to lets say 50% (very doable by the way) then
your figures would now look like this:
Step 1) product_landing_page.php 10,000
visits.
Step 2) add_to_cart.php 8000 visits (20%
abandon)
Step 3) review_order.php 4000 visits (50%
abandon)
Step 4) add_details.php 2000 visits (50%
abandon)
Step 5) purchase_success.php 660 visits
(66% abandon)
That would mean a fantastic increase in the numbers
of buyers. Instead of a 0.4% conversion rate you now
have a 6.6% conversion rate. You basically have the
same advertising spend to drive the same numbers of
traffic but you have a much improved return on your
advertising spend. This is one reason why measurement
is so important because without measuring the scenario
you would never know the problem existed.
So how do you improve the scenario?
That s the million dollar question and in some case
we've worked on it really can be worth a million dollars
or more. The follow up article to this one is going
to show one such improvement in detail however it s
impossible to say why people might be leaving your site
in similar numbers without a detailed study of the problem
pages. We've found it's usually because the website
is making things un-necessarily difficult for the website
visitor. They might have scary looking forms to fill
in, or moving from the shopping cart to purchase page
might not be obvious. The point is that web analytics
systems can point out these problems so that you can
attempt to figure out what is wrong.
In summary web analytics does 2 things well
Using web analytics tools allow you to establish facts
and begin developing scientific tests. Firstly you should
establish the facts so you may find out where your problems
are as we illustrated in this article. Then once you
have determined where your problem areas are you can
begin working on improvements. If your improvements
make it easier for your visitor to move to the next
step of your purchase scenario (in this case) then your
next test should try to improve the next step and so
on until you have the abandonment rate as low as possible.
Author:
Steve Jackson, Editor - Conversion Chronicles
Steve Jackson is CEO of Aboavista, editor of The Conversion
Chronicles and a published writer. You can get a free
copy of his e-book sent to you upon subscription to
the Chronicles website (http://www.conversionchronicles.com/). |
