N.B. This blog is a summary of my talk How to leverage Analytics data to find out where you lose potential customers at WordCamp Europe 2024. You can also take a look at the slides.
If you have a webshop, you want people to buy your products. However, not everyone visiting your site will buy something. So what do you do if you want to increase sales? You could make some changes to your website and hope for the best. Maybe more people will start buying your products, right? Or you can find out where people are dropping out, and make specific changes to those pages to improve the user flow. This blog describes the steps you can take to sell more products by taking the second approach.
Your website is a funnel
You can view your website as a funnel. There are a lot of people at the top of the funnel: on your homepage, your category pages, and your product pages. But the further you go down in the funnel, and the closer you get to the actual purchase, the fewer people will be there.
That means that throughout the funnel, people are leaving. They start to doubt whether they want to buy something from you. Maybe they decide the product is not for them, it’s too expensive, or they prefer another brand than yours. You won’t be able to keep everyone in the funnel from beginning to end. But if you know where in the funnel most people leave, you can make changes to those specific pages to keep some additional people on board. But how do you know where people are dropping out?
Creating funnels in analytics tools
This is where Google Analytics or other analytics tools are coming in. In those tools, you can create funnels. The steps you want to include in your funnel are up to you. So think about what types of pages you have on your website, and about the order people navigate between them. For a standard eCommerce website, it might look like this: Home > Category pages > Product pages > Cart > Checkout > Purchase.
Even though I will use an eCommerce site as an example throughout this blog, it’s just as useful to make funnels if you have a blog and want people to subscribe to your newsletter, or if you are the Product Owner of the support section of a bigger website.
Making the funnel easier to understand
After defining your funnel steps, your analytics tool will show the resulting funnel. In my opinion, the resulting funnel in GA4 is not that clear, because it contains the same information multiple times in multiple formats (percentages and absolute numbers, and completion rates and abandonment rates, which are the inverse of each other). That’s why I like to get a bit creative in Google Sheets, to get a cleaner display of the same data.
Keeping more people in the funnel
In the above funnel, you can see how many people are in each of the steps, and how many of them continue to the next step. One of the things that stand out of this funnel, is that only 24.5% of the users on the cart continue to the checkout. That’s not very much. So why are people dropping out? How can we keep more people on board?
The funnel is a real example from one of our clients. So we started thinking about what we could do on the cart to improve the click-through rate to the checkout. We thought that people might need some extra reassurance about their upcoming purchase. So, we added an element to the cart to tell visitors they were buying for the lowest price possible, that their products would be delivered fast, and that many happy customers came before them.
Validating the solution
After we thought of this possible solution, we ran an A/B test to validate it. Because us thinking it might be a good idea, doesn’t necessarily mean that it will actually keep more people in the funnel. So for a few weeks, we showed 50% of the visitors the original version, and 50% of the visitors the version with the extra reassurance.
Statistical analysis showed us that it was a winning idea indeed. More people clicked through from the cart to the checkout in the version where we added the extra reassurance. As I showed before, 24.5% of the users in the original cart continued to the checkout. When we implemented the change and added more reassurance, we saw the effects in the funnel. The percentage went up to 26.4%.
Of course, this is only a change of 2 percent points, but it did lead to an increase in sales. If you have a lot of traffic, this 2% can have a big impact. For some websites, that might mean a million of additional revenue. But also if you have a smaller website, stacking small changes will make a lot of difference over time.
Start optimizing!
If you want to start optimizing your own website, use funnels to find out where people are dropping out, and use experiments to verify your solutions. To do so, take the following steps:
- Make funnels and check the clickthrough rate between the funnel steps.
- Find out where you lose the biggest group of potential customers
- Take a critical look at those pages, and come up with possible solutions for the problems your customers might run into.
- Experiment with those solutions and implement those that work well.
- Check the funnels after implementation.
- Keep repeating this process over and over again.
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Some final tips and tricks
Not all funnels are created equal. To get the most information from your funnels, and to make sure you have a solid basis to start from, I have four final tips and tricks for you.
Firstly, create multiple funnels starting from different pages, because not everyone will enter your site through the homepage. For example, make funnels starting from the category pages and product pages if a lot of people land there. If there are multiple paths that your customers take to add a product to their cart, create funnels for all of them.
Secondly, look at specific segments, like device types, because sometimes you’ll find different patterns. However, don’t use too many segments, because it’s impossible to maintain a website that has many segment-specific features.
Thirdly, always use entire weeks in your funnels to even out any weekday or weekend effects. Depending on the product you’re selling, people might be browsing your site during weekdays, and actually buy your products during the weekend, when they have more time, for example.
Lastly, always use multiple weeks in your funnels to even out outliers. You don’t want to make decisions based on one very good or very bad week.
Want help optimising your website? Feel free to contact us or take a look at our services!
