4 minutes read
Having a clear understanding of your conversion funnels is vital for building effective online marketing campaigns and improving your business performance. Funnel analysis is the best way to maximize CRO opportunities. It lets you better understand your customer experience, spot what pages/content engage them the most, and at what point they turn away. Google Analytics is especially useful for this purpose. Let’s learn how to strengthen your CRO by unlocking the power of funnel analytics.
What Is a Conversion Funnel
A conversion funnel is a set of steps a user should take to convert. It may be as simple as creating an account to make an order or taking other actions. Every website has its unique funnel, representing how customers approach their marketing. Most businesses face the challenge that users do not always follow the perfectly designed conversion funnels and take different and often unexpected ways to bring them to a conversion.
Reasons to Use Funnel Analysis to Increase CRO
Funnel analysis is a comprehensive visual presentation of when your website visitor becomes a customer. With a proper funnel analysis, you can examine all stages of the UX to discover where your potential customers turn away. Based on this knowledge, you can find out what discourages your clients from moving forward in the sales cycle and get an idea of creating the right strategy to address conversion issues.
Funnel analytics isn’t only used for marketing and eCommerce purposes, but it can also provide detailed insights into how users interact with applications and programs. In this article, we will focus on using advanced funnel analysis to increase CRO.
CRO aims to increase the percentage of visitors taking specific action on your site. Based on the type of objective you follow, we can differentiate macro objectives (the main goal of your site, like a product purchase, subscription, etc.) and micro objectives (small steps that users should take to achieve a macro objective).
Google Analytics is one of the most effective tools helping you measure funnel goals and reduce the number of abandoned customer journeys. Create a goal for a specific page in Google Analytics. Specify the conditions upon which a goal is achieved (for example, when a user arrives at a particular place on the web page).
Custom funnels in Google Analytics focus on the three major behavioral metrics:
- Goal Conversion Rate measures the competition of the desired action performed by your website visitor.
- Bounce Rate, the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.
- Click-Through Rate, measuring how often people click on your ads.
How to Begin Funnel Analysis the Right Way
When you start using marketing analysis, it’s better to start with broader issues with your website. Learning the basic functionality issues of your site provides you with deeper insights on what you should look at in more detail in the future.
Keep your funnels simple when you begin the analysis until you learn what exactly is needed for your business. Add more details to your funnel inquiry rather than sifting out irrelevant data from the basic analysis. Easy-to-view funnel analysis is the best way to find out where you should focus your attention to improve your site’s function as much as it’s possible.
Create Partial Funnels
It may be difficult to visualize and understand data when too many steps are featured in your funnel. In this case, you’d better create partial funnels, focusing on different steps. For example, you can make a partial funnel that focuses on the first step of the purchase.
- Thus, the first step will represent the people who visit your website (these are 100% of your visitors).
- The second step covers the users who run searches on the site (let’s say, 70% of visitors).
- The third step represents users who click on a search result (55%).
- The fourth and final step is the percent of users who add a product to the shopping cart (50%).
Based on this example, we can see that users who search for something on your site and click on search results are more likely to finish the browsing session with a purchase. That’s why it’s useful to take a closer look at UX before clicking on the results.
It’s also a clever move to look at different subsets of users and compare funnels of each of them. As an example, you can compare funnels of first-time visitors and repeat customers. When you look through the analytics, you can also see stats on how many first-time visitors don’t run a search on your site. For example, 60% of first-time visitors don’t perform a search, while returning customers almost always do.
Running funnel analysis is key to investing your resources wisely. Develop funnels with a clear goal in your mind. Otherwise, you may affect your business and run out of fuel before reaching the goal.
At Atypical Design, we can advise the most effective marketing strategy to bring up leads and move them down your sales funnel. Contact us to discuss how to improve CRO within your budget.