The digital world has evolved beyond all recognition over the last 15 years. The expanse and sophistication of websites has grown exponentially along with the multiplicity of online offerings. This in turn has transformed the online behaviour of consumers, along with their needs and expectations. When trying to measure and understand this behaviour, digital analysts have always used impressions, CTR & conversion rates as their “go to” metrics. However, in today’s complex online environment, classic web analytics metrics no longer make the grade – at best they give you a topline view of your site’s performance.
The latest advanced data processing and
storage capabilities allow you to carry out far more complex analyses –
providing you with a clearer, more precise, and more in-depth understanding. By
going beyond analysing traditional website analytics metrics – page views, click-through
& conversions rates, you can create significant value by observing user
paths on a site, i.e. how users go from the landing page to the conversion or
exit page. Based on this information, it’s possible to make a qualitative assessment
which will reveal ways to optimise a website’s performance.
Here are three types of qualitative analyses
that can help boost the measurement and effectiveness of your sales funnel.
1. Visualise your top consumer paths
Gaining a macro understanding of major flows on your website is a great starting place: visualising your top 5 paths or your top-viewed pages following a page of interest will provide valuable insights into how most users interact with your platform.
It’s also useful to add a segment on specific users to your analysis and observe how these top paths differ according to the various clusters. For example, by comparing converting and non-converting users, or by segmenting based on engagement figures, you can understand the varying needs of your users and tailor your services accordingly. They may have different interests and are looking to consume different content: rich media vs. written content for example. The complex consumer interactions
with a brand’s platform is unique to each brand –
and must be customised. It’s only by segmenting
your consumer base that will you be able to analyse their individual and unique needs.
2. Identify synergies & areas of improvement
Most analysts already have a decent understanding of
which user flows are critical to paths for their business – if not, a macro
view described above will show you which of your user paths are
important. With shrinking attention spans (!), an effective way to drive optimisation is by shortening them and making the user experience as straightforward as possible.
It’s also important to pay specific
attention to each step along the paths and optimise those with high users churn
rates – a conversion funnel is only as good as its weakest link! You can take
this further by distinguishing between users who drop off the funnel and leave
the website, and users who drop off but stay on the site. Their intention will
be different depending on their respective category.
3. Peripheral paths: recognising patterns outside your key conversion paths
Although most of your time should be spent
optimising your most valuable conversion funnels, don’t forget to keep an eye
on recognising patterns outside your key conversion paths. If you’re too
focused on one specific part of your site, you may be missing out on a smaller
(yet important) part of the traffic. By identifying correlated content on the
website, you can determine if users who read blog article A and more likely to
convert than users who read blog article B.
AT Internet navigation paths
At AT Internet we want you to be able to extract as much value as possible from our solution.
The Navigation tool seamlessly integrated into Explorer allows you to extract qualitative information. This provides our clients with a solid and genuine understanding of visitor behaviour to be used on top of classic web analytics metrics.
The Navigation tool gives you the ability to quickly identify your top consumer paths. You can then take this thought process further with the tree-view analysis – an interactive tool to explore and reveal insights
and enable you to solve your user flow issues over the long term.
