Conversion Optimisation – become an ATC

Site owners are naturally looking for where they can make the biggest improvements with the least effort in terms of resource and cost. I think this has led to the popularity of landing page optimisation through AB and multivariate testing.

The table shows that the use of KPIs is quite well understood today, with most marketers knowing their conversion rates from their bounce rates and AOV. Likewise, improving calls-to-action and development of landing pages has a relatively good level of focus.

But, the chart shows that most think there are many other areas they need to give more attention to. For me journey analysis is a key activity.

I think there are two issues here, first where visitors are routed to when they first come to the site and secondly, the journeys forward from the initial pages.

How effective is your traffic routeing?

While many have become effective at pointing paid search traffic at the right landing page, natural search visitors often don't arrive on an appropriate page and this can be seen well in a report in Google Analytics using an Advanced Segmentation report showing paid and non-paid search traffic segmented by landing page.

If your natural visitors are bouncing you either need to route them to another page (tricky) or provide a more relevant experience when they land.

Google Analytics also has useful reports on customer journeys, but they are slightly hidden in that they are not in the main menu on the left as for some analytics systems, rather you have to chose a specific page. This intuitive when you know, but not if you don't go beyond the top content trends.

The Navigation Summary can be used for forward or reverse path analysis. For many types of sites, reverse path analysis is really useful - you can see where people are flowing to  your conversion pages such as the lead gen form or Add to Basket page. It highlights the most popular paths and the content that influences the decision - for example - how many who convert go to the "About Us" page?

You can also use the Entrance Paths report for forward path analysis - this shows which content  visitors prefer when arriving at a particular page. But I prefer the navigation summary report for reviewing flows in both directions.

So think of yourself as an air traffic controller landing your planes on the right runway according to their origin and then routing/routeing them to the right terminal gate as efficiently as possible by using the best signposts and scent trails.