Conversion funnel analysis

Conversion funnel is the visualization of user flows and the stages visitors go through before they convert. It’s called a “conversion funnel” because the number of ecommerce leads at every stage reduces and in the end, only a part of them generate sales. A standard ecommerce conversion funnel consists of three levels – upper, mid, and lower. For upper conversion funnel optimization, you need to attract the right audience based on keywords, content, display, and social media ads. To optimize flows on the mid and lower conversion stages, make sure to build trust, show the benefits of your products, and pull ecommerce leads back into the nurturing phase once they convert.

A typical sales funnel includes six stages: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase. At the awareness stage, potential customers know nothing about your ecommerce offer and come across your marketing materials for the first time. During the interest and consideration stages, they learn more about the company and turn into marketing qualified leads. At the intent step, customers show the readiness to purchase and make the final decision during the evaluation. If the previous ecommerce and marketing stages were smooth, they finally purchase. Note that by using the ecommerce funnel creator, you can connect these steps and minimize distractions from the target action.

Ecommerce conversion analysis tools detect user flows and problems on your website, but you need to know how to fix them. Browse the web and pick several similar online resources you consider convenient and effective. Navigate them to understand the main concept behind the conversion path. Borrow these ideas for your own optimization.

Every second spent on your online resource, visitors may take dozens of actions. Unfortunately, not all of their decisions result in conversions. Optimization helps to show people the right direction and minimize unnecessary interactions. You detect problematic spots in the funnel and use heatmap or session recording software to find out what exactly distracts customers. Such an optimization strategy helps to increase lead generation rates, maximize the marketing ROI, improve the website, and more.

Before you create any digital marketing strategy, decide what results you want to achieve in the long run. For example, build brand awareness through blog subscriptions, increase ecommerce sales, or attract more customers to your offline store. After you know the KPIs, use conversion funnel visualization to see how weak spots in current flows prevent you from getting what you need. Next, think about the ways to fix the problems at each stage. If you have trouble with awareness or need to boost lead generation, consider SEO and search engine advertising. To stir interest, pay more attention to blogs and acquisition through social media. To strengthen consideration, use email marketing, special offers, and website analysis. At evaluation and ecommerce purchase stages, connect with customers through more personalized marketing messages. Attention to each of the conversion stages is key to creating an effective sales cycle.

You can both map user behavior based on their actions and visited pages. First, use the conversion funnel creator to map general user flows. For example, you will see that after visiting the product page, people return to the home page instead of going to the cart. Such analytics data means that your online resource doesn't work as intended. At the second step of the analysis, take a look at the sequence and types of actions completed by website visitors. Plerdy includes heatmap and scroll map tools that can provide more detailed information on online behavior.

To optimize the acquisition conversion funnel, you will need to follow a set of testing instructions and some acquisition tips. Here’re the main testing steps:

• Use the acquisition funnel creator to visualize the funnel.
• Pick the area for improvement (landing page, product page, shopping cart, etc.) and analyze it more deeply to detect the key issues.
• Focus on the detected problems and think about the ways to eliminate them.
• Pick the most effective hypothesis that is likely to solve the conversion troubles.
• Run A/B tests to see how the implemented changes impact the KPIs.
• If the result is positive, great job! If the problem persists, consider another strategy to optimize the website.

Besides, you have to make your online resource simple and easy to navigate. It’s also important to monitor it with regular reports and study the analytics data collected with the acquisition funnel creator.

First of all, you need to know your target audience. Understand what they are looking for on your website with analytics tools, and rely on this data creating the customer journey. The behavioral patterns and, hence, sequences of actions differ among different groups of the target audience. To find out this information and create an effective online sales funnel, we recommend combining several Plerdy tools. Whereas the funnel creator visualizes the conversion path, heatmap reports show specific interactions. If this data isn’t enough, you can also use session recording to view how visitors navigate the web resource.

It’s not a disaster if you lose a few customers on the way to conversion. – It’s a disaster if you don’t know why they leave and do nothing to stop them. Here’re the main factors that may indicate that customers are leaving your ecommerce resource in large numbers or remain inactive: 1.) You have a lot of visitors but many of them don’t complete the target action and convert into customers. 2.) You don’t get enough new leads and the targeted people don’t show interest in your offer. 3.) Many visitors sign up for a free trial but don’t switch to the paid subscription. Such hints should help you understand at which stage of the funnel most people leave. For more accurate information and statistics, use the Plerdy tool. It will show the number and percentage of sessions at all conversion steps.

Plerdy simplifies data analysis with visualizations that show complex statistics with convenient graphs and images. The conversion report looks like the real funnel divided into several levels. For each of them, the report provides the number and percentage of sessions. The upper part (awareness and interest) usually shows a higher level of user activity than subsequent steps, which means that you’re losing customers on their way to purchase. The narrower is the part of the funnel, the fewer ecommerce website visitors reach this point. This allows you to quickly evaluate the overall situation with conversion and find out when people start bouncing. In Plerdy, you can also segment visitors by device type (desktop, mobile, and tablet) to assess website performance on different devices. There are also additional visualization features and traffic channel segmentation to customize the graph.