The first point of failure for potential customers is if they cannot even find a product on your website that appeals enough to look closely at it. Four of five visitors who are shopping on a website should view a product. If less than that, something is not right – but what could it be? If you could pinpoint the issue, make a fix, reduce the number of visitors abandoning at this early stage, your sales go up. So how to pinpoint the issue?
The Digital Analytics workshop on 18th June focused on identifying and understanding issues for why visitors abandon their shopping process prior to viewing a product. Peter demonstrates the process he goes through to identify the reasons why visitors give up early in the customer journey. Rather than simply giving a checklist of web analytics reports to review, he demonstrates his thought processes. Learning these techniques means they can be used to address any Digital Analytics question that needs an answer.
The recording of this workshop is below. Below that you can find my answers to audience questions that were raised during the workshop. Finally, a button at the bottom of the screen allows you to download a PDF of the deck.
For more details on the Ecommerce funnel, please read this blog post.
Audience Questions
How do you define a homepage and a shopping page? Many brands might have a mix of everything on their homepage, you can see some products there, does the home page count as a shopping page?
It is not possible to tell for sure if someone is shopping or not when on the website, all we can do is infer their intent based on their behaviour. While the homepage can contain products, simply viewing the homepage doesn’t suggest intent to shop. If the visitor goes on to view one of these products, or clicks to view a product list page or performs a search, then that indicates intent to shop. Hence the homepage is not considered a shopping page.
How much does customer persona type factor into your thinking when considering funnel analysis?
As can be seen on slide 22, this implicitly defines visitor personas. Not in the traditional sense based on age, gender, socioeconomic status, etc but based on the reason for the visit and likely actions taken. I am more in agreement with this article on “jobs to be done” personas, I think this logic makes much more sense. It is similar, if not the same, as the visit type within this two-tiered segmentation model.
Are there standard retail targets for total>PLP>PDP etc?
While not quite as specific as that, I am confident with the targets I use within the Ecommerce funnel, that have added value for over 10 years now. I refer to these targets within my talk but more details can be found in my article on the Ecommerce funnel.
Any more questions
Hopefully this approach to identifying issues with website performance, thinking about why people act the way they do instead of just looking at reports, makes sense. If you have any questions, please leave in the comments or send me an email.
If you would like my approach applied to your business, get in touch and we can talk through how I can support you to work smarter and achieve more success.
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