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Investigating a Drop in Conversion: A Quick How To
Some of the hardest things for less experienced web analysts to investigate are often some of the most basic; questions such as “why did my conversion drop?” or “why did my bounce rate suddenly increase?” are often so large that that they can be overwhelming and difficult for a new analyst to approach.
In this article I will walk through the process that I recently used to investigate a drop in conversion for one of my smaller clients. The basic process that I use is to start with the highest level metrics from the broadest reports and then work my way down through more specific metrics in more targeted reports. These are the same methods that can be used to investigate all manner of metrics and issues. Please note that names and products have been changed to protect confidentiality.
1. Start by identifying the fundamental parts of the metric that you are investigating. In this example my client and I started by breaking the conversion rate into orders and visitors. (Conversion = Orders/Visitors) In the Topline Summary Report I trended these two metrics over 90 days and looked for unexplained spikes and jumps. (I strongly recommend looking at days because weeks and months can often shroud changes within a veil of aggregation)
I wanted to see if the conversion rate had decreased because the orders remained flat and the visitors increased or did it decrease because the visitors remained flat and the orders decreased?
2. Looking at the data I determined that the visitor count had increased over the past two weeks. The next step was to trend all of the channels in the Channel Summary report in order to determine which channel brought this increase in visitors.
3. I noticed that the increase in visitors was due to referring sites and zoomed into the Referring Sites Report to determine which specific site(s) had sent the additional traffic.
4. In the Referring Sites report I sorted by visitors and then trended some of the top performers. I quickly saw that the traffic from one referring site, a large national men’s fashion site called mensmagazine.com, had increased sharply within the past two weeks.
5. I created a key segment based upon mensmagazine.com as the referral source and applied it to the Content Categories Report. This showed that the traffic was all entering on a specific Men’s Clothing Category Page and that much of this traffic was bouncing.
6. Finally I ran an Explore report to see the exact referring URLs from mensmagazine.com that sent traffic to this category page. When I visited that URL I could see that it was an article promoting a specific pair of winter boots but that the link provided in the article obviously didn’t go to those boots.
7. The result of this was that my client was being sent a large amount of new visitors who were landing on a page that didn’t particularly interest them. The increase in visitors drove the conversion rate down and the bounce rate up.
8. My client and I then had to determine what we could do based upon this information. In the short term my client modified the category page to feature a large image of the winter boots and in the long term reached out to the magazine to try and get the link corrected. Over the next week we were able to see the conversion rate return back to normal and the bounce rate decrease once the new visitors were able to actually find the product that they were interested in.
The main takeaway of this example is the process of working through the reporting to peel back the layers of data in order to reveal the one actionable piece of information. I have used this same simple process time and time again when investigating questions to either find the answer or at least eliminate the incorrect answers.
We Increased our Bookings by 345%
“We’ve already noticed our conversion rate has TRIPPLED, and the number of clicks required to convert has reduced dramatically.”
- Ben Sebborn, Director, Skiddle Ltd.
Skiddle, one of the UK’s top entertainment websites, suspected that its visitors weren’t browsing their site the way they were supposed to. They therefore decided to use ClickTale to find out exactly how their visitors were interacting with their site, and to use its revolutionary behavioural analytics suite to optimize their customers’ experience. What they learned was extremely insightful and resulted in an amazing 345% bookings increase in just 4 weeks!!
Skiddle saw phenomenal increases in their restaurant bookings
Skiddle.com offers a ticket search and booking service for events, restaurants, hotels and more. Originally, visitors would first have to search by a specific date, and only then find an available restaurant and make a booking. Using conventional analytics, Skiddle noticed that visitors would often search, find the restaurant they wanted, and then leave the site without converting! They understood that they were losing sales, but conventional web analytics alone could not tell them why.
Skiddle's conversion rate was drastically improved
Skiddle turned to ClickTale to find out why visitors were leaving the site without completing their booking. By watching the recorded visitor browsing sessions provided by ClickTale, the Skiddle team discovered that visitors were much more interested in finding deals than they were in booking a reservation on a specific date. Skiddle then redesigned the site to make it easier to search for deals and added a multiple date option on the search result pages.
The redesigned Skiddle.com's restaurant page
And the results?
The numbers speak for themselves! A 345% increase in weekly booking in just under a month, a massive increase in the average time spent on site, and a higher amount of pages viewed per visitor. Additionally, Skiddle now sees more repeat visitors and return customers than ever before!
Skiddle's new website, now perfectly optimized for the ultimate customer experience
The tools used by Skiddle are available to all our subscribers, even on the free plan. So you can sign up today and see instant improvements in customer experience, usability and conversion rates.
Regards,
The ClickTale Team
How to Cut Form Abandonments by 50%
"With the data provided by ClickTale, we were able to cut abandonments by 50%!" – Ollie Pennington, Director, ServiceSeeking.com.au
By: Ollie Pennington, Director, ServiceSeeking.com.au
ServiceSeeking.com.au helps Australians get projects done by having businesses compete head to head for their work. The most important page on our site is the “Post Your Project” page where customers request new quotes. While projects were being submitted, our conversion rate was too low and we had to know what was going on inside the page.
We first heard about ClickTale from the Boagworld web design podcast and thought that watching movies of our visitors would be the best way to figure out usability issues on our site. Using their In-Page Analytics, we could finally figure out why our page was not converting as well as we had hoped.
Our “Post Your Project” form asks customers to give us 16 pieces of information. Using ClickTale’s Form Analytics Conversion and Drop Reports, we were able to see how many people were engaging with this form, how long it was taking to complete and which fields were causing customers to abandon the process.
From the Form Analytics reports we learned that:
- 44% of visitors left without engaging the form.
- 59% of visitors who did engage with the form abandoned it in the middle without submitting the form.
- 20% of visitors abandoned the form when we asked them to provide an approximate budget for their project.
- 10% of visitors abandoned the form when we asked them about their project location.
It became clear to us that asking for 2 pieces of relatively simple information (budget and location) was causing the bulk of the abandonments.
Using the great insights from our ClickTale data together with Luke Wroblewski’s book on web form design (discount offer below) we dramatically improved our conversion rate by taking the following steps:
1. First, we re-structured the form using 3 clear sub-headers.
This helps new visitors quickly work out what information is required and reduced the fraction that left without engaging with the form.
2. We replaced the drop-down menus with radio buttons which have the most popular selections set as default.
Before
After
3. We looked into our data and discovered that most people chose an “Undisclosed” budget, which was the very last option in our old drop-down menu. So we added that as a radio button selection.
Before
After
4. Finally, we condensed separate fields asking for suburb and state into a single text field with auto-suggestions.
Before
After
The results so far have been amazing! In the first few weeks, we have reduced form abandonment rate from 59% to 31% – this is a tremendous improvement that will reduce our cost of new customer acquisition dramatically.
Thanks ClickTale.
- Ollie Pennington, Director, ServiceSeeking.com.au
Editors note:
Use the code word CLICKTALE to get a 20% discount on Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski and any other product in the at the Rosenfeld Media web site.
8 Brilliant Tips That Boost Conversions
Did you know that about 40-50% of your site’s visitors leave after seeing just a single page?*
If half of your traffic disappears, it will take a heavy toll on your site’s conversion rate. Understanding why visitors leave and how they interact with your site is crucial to your business, and bottom line.
ClickTale has helped thousands of sites like yours gain insight into customer behavior by showing actual visitor sessions, mouse movements, clicks, scrolls and more.
Based on the feedback of many of our customers, as well as our own experiences, we have prepared a set of 8 ‘best practices’ to help you boost conversion rates and improve site usability.
We’d love to hear your feedback and about your experience using ClickTale to optimize your website.
*According to two independent surveys by Anil Batra and Panalysis.1. Visual-ize it
Images and movies are the easiest types of content to absorb quickly, and using them effectively can boost your readers’ attention span and encourage longer interactions.
Don’t forget to make images clickable! They will be clicked!
Schwan’s uses images superbly and, in fact, are one of the highest converting retail websites around.
Did you know?
People love looking at faces, especially the faces of attractive people…
Esquire.com uses lots of images to get visitor attention. How many faces can you count? We counted 9!
2. Read this and Win
Did we get your attention? Are your headlines working for, or against you? If your visitors aren’t immediately captured by your headlines, they’ll quickly leave your site. Don’t worry! You don’t need to be a world-class copywriter to come up with great headlines. With a little bit of practice, and some testing, you can hone your headline skills and grab the attention of your audience.
Ask yourself these short questions:
- Is the headline short and to the point?
- Is it worded in terms of benefits to the visitor (and not product features)?
Your headlines should encourage the visitor to continue reading, highlighting the benefits of doing so while keeping it believable and specific.
Apple.com website says so much with just a few well chosen words.
Want to learn more about writing headlines? Read about how to write the “World’s Best Headlines” in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox.
3. Put your Best Stuff up Top
Most readers never scroll down, and when they do the drop-off rate follows a distinct pattern (see graph below). In fact, page areas near the top of the page get about 17 times more exposure than the areas near the bottom of the page, according to a research report by ClickTale. This means that everything important or newsworthy, or any call to action, needs to be above the page fold.
The chart above shows where on the page visitors are paying attention, as they scroll towards the bottom of the page. To see your own visitors’ scrolling behavior, we recommend using ClickTale’s Scrolling Heatmaps.
4. Make content Pop
The really important stuff, the things you want to stand out, should be emphasized. Did you notice how we use bold typeface to draw your attention to certain words or sentences? Experiment with font size, bold, italics, color and highlighting to find the most effective places and methods to grab your readers’ attention and call them to action.
Conversion Rate Experts do an excellent job using different font styles and colors to get their messages across.
5. WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?)
Sites usually get it wrong by focusing on themselves (the site) and not the user (i.e. “Me”). Chapter 3 of Dan Pink’s The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, a fantastic manga-style career guide, puts it this way: “It’s not about you”.
That’s right, accept it, it’s not. It’s about the user community, that is, your sites target audience. Your site exists to serve this audience, and everything done on your site should have this focus.
This Best-Practice is actually quite simple.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Is this page/form/offer/etc actually of real value to my audience?
- Why should they care?
- How is it useful to them?
Mint.com homepage concisely conveys what’s-in-it-for “you” (their potential customers).
6. You ask TOO much
We hate to be the one to tell you this, but you ask for too much info on your signup forms and checkout pages! Visitors are extremely sensitive to the quantity and type of information asked from them, and every additional question significantly decreases the likelihood of form completion, harming your conversion rates.
Did you know?
The least-intrusive and fewest-question forms are the biggest winners.
Facebook is a great example of a simple, short and effective sign up form.
Two Tribes used ClickTale’s Form Analytics to optimize their online forms and got a 50% increase in conversion rates.
7. Watch your visitors
Running usability tests used to be difficult and expensive. Not anymore. With ClickTale (start using it for Free) you’re able to conduct usability testing by watching your visitors’ actual browsing sessions.
Usability testing will help you discover what’s “broken” on your website, and answer questions like:
- Why are visitors leaving my landing pages?
- Why do they fail to make purchases?
- Which pages never get scrolled?
Watch this short (about a minute) ClickTale video to learn how to run online usability testing.
Did you know?
Breaking down problems makes it easier to fix them. After running usability testing, compile a list of the top 5 things that are “broken” on your site. This will help you focus on the most urgent problems, and prioritize issues. Once you’re done, go to step #8 (Testing).
8. Test – Repair – Retest
Small changes often make major impacts on the bottom line, which is why we recommend that you test every section of your site, in order to maximize revenue and conversion potential. Using a service such as Google’s Website Optimizer to run “multivariate tests” or running a simple A/B test, is a great way to see what works best.
Run your testing in three stages:
I. Fix all of the things that are “broken” (which you’ll discover during your usability tests, see #7 above). This is worth doing first, because it’s the easiest way to make quick improvements.
II. Watch your visitors again with ClickTale, to make sure you actually fixed what was broken. If things are still screwy, or if further tweaking is necessary, go back to step I.
III. Test new ideas that have the potential to significantly grow your business. Again, it’s important to watch the results of your changes to see how they are really impacting your business.
Here is an example of an A/B/C experiment using Google’s Website Optimizer.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to web design, there are no firm set of rules. But following these simple guidelines will help you optimize your site and improve conversion rates, as it has ours and thousands of other websites.
So remember:
- Fantastic visuals grab visitors attention
- Great headlines encourage action
- Float your best content to the top
- Make important content stand out
- WIIFM
- Fewer questions boost conversions
- Run usability tests
- Test, repair, and retest
We would love to hear how these guidelines (or any other tips) have helped you with your site optimization. Send us your experiences and we will mention your feedback in a future follow-up article!
Still hungry for more tips?
- Check out the 108 Tips from Conversion Rate Experts. Hey, look at that, we’re on the list.
- Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert
- 7 More Useful Tips To Help Your Site Convert
