What is it that turns website visitors into paying customers? What is the process they go through to become subscribers or customers? These two questions are of paramount importance for e-commerce companies, but what if your website does not have a shopping cart? How do you analyze conversion funnels for non e-commerce websites?
Chances are, you’ve found the answers to these questions hard to uncover. At the end of the day, your business may have dozens of conversion funnels. So, how do you discover these conversion funnels and analyze them in a structured way?
Typically, you will open your analytics tool and start straight off with “How is our conversion funnel doing?” or “What are our conversion funnel KPIs?” Basically, you dive head first into the details. And that’s fine. Sadly, though, this can lead to overlooking the macro insights.
Our recommendation, on the other hand, is to start with the big picture of your conversion funnel, and then dive into the details.
Why? Because when you’re bogged down in the details of your daily reports, everything seems to be important. It is tough, given this reality, to make decisions about what to act on, and what to ignore. No surprises then if you fail to improve your company’s bottom line in a significant way.
How do you uncover conversion funnels? Start by answering these 4 questions about your visitors:
Before you go into battle with your data, make sure that you start at the right place. Your conversion funnel analysis should begin with your customer. Why? Because you may discover patterns that you didn’t know existed. Are your website visitors all converting in the same way or do they fall into many different groups or categories that each converts differently? If they are different, than what are the differences? Make sure that you answer, right at the outset, four simple questions essential for macro analysis:
1. Where are your visitors coming from?
Acquisition by source and medium
Referrals
2. Who are the people that visit your website?
Are they new prospects or existing customers (new vs returning)?
How much do they like your site (time on site)?
What device are they using (device category)?
Where are they accessing your site (location)?
3. Why do they come to your site?
Top entry pages
Search keywords
4. What are they doing on your website?
Top viewed pages
Top exit pages
Do you feel like it’s a lot of work to gather all the data to answer these questions? You go into one report in Google Analytics, take all the numbers down, then another, then another… But in Analytics Canvas, this process can be completed in less than a minute!
If you are not yet a user of Analytics Canvas, you can download a trial here to create your own conversion funnel analysis. If you are already a user of Analytics Canvas, open Analytics Canvas to build the following two queries from scratch (or download our template here).
In the first query, include the following:
Dimensions
country
fullReferrer
medium
keyword
deviceCategory
Metrics
sessions
bounces
sessionDuration
pageviewsPerSession
users
To avoid mixing page and session level dimensions, create another query and include the following:
Dimensions
pagePath
Metrics
entrances
uniquePageviews
exits
Here is an example report that is based on these two queries.
You can download this template here. You will need to have Analytics Canvas on your computer to be able to generate this report for your website. Note: You will need to sign in to access your Google Analytics account. Don’t forget to hit play (or “Tools” > “Run with all data and write to exports”) to generate this report.