Funnel analysis is a riddle in website optimization.
Funnel analysis is a riddle in website optimization process which comes with a lot of benefits. After few studies about the relationship between humans and our prowess in implementing the procured knowledge, it is pretty clear that until we understand the usage of particular concept we don’t tend to spend much time by practicing it.
The same way while optimizing our websites, we pay no heed to funnel analysis since we are not sure of its invaluable benefits. With funnel analysis, you can get insights on actions taken by the visitors on your website.
It can be used to gain deeper understanding on what the visitors are doing and where most of them are leaving your website.
Tweaking websites is indeed a big deal. Before making changes, it is necessary to know where you stand. Even if you have focused CTAs on your homepage such as ‘Get a free demo’ or ‘Sign up for free’, you could lose a good chunk of your visitors since they might have decided not to continue.
There are several such scenarios where visitors don’t spend much time on the page or leave immediately. Funnel analysis is the ideal solution for these situations.
So the first step is to know where funnel analysis should be used in a website and how it can _reduce visitor drop off_s. Once you understand the visitors’ behavior and where they are dropping the most, it will be easier to take further steps and improve the overall conversion rate.
I have found four divergent industries where funnel analysis can play an effective role in the conversion optimization process.
E-commerce websites (Flipkart, Amazon, eBay)
E-commerce websites have become the most used portals these days since they serve as a platform that aggregates all the necessary things we require in our regular life.
While the number of customers who are making online purchases is rocketing day by day, the count of e-commerce websites is also increasing simultaneously.
Hence, these websites have become the most common users of funnel analysis. Generally, e-commerce websites use funnel analysis to understand how their visitors navigate through the website especially the cart and checkout pages.
For ex: You have a check out page which has a flow like
Cart page → Delivery details page → Final payment/Payment gateway → Checkout/Thank you page
A visitor might have gone till ‘Final payment’ step but might choose to leave the website without making any purchase. This happens with many customers where they religiously complete several steps but at the end, they decide not to purchase.
Actions like these can hurt your website conversions a real lot. So, to understand the flow of your visitors and to know where they are leaving your website, funnel analysis must be used.
Media and Apps (AppStore, iTunes)
Websites for media purposes where users come and scroll through various music albums or movie files and download them are good examples for Funnel analysis. For websites like these, the major goal would be to get more users to download the files by clicking on the ‘download option’.
So these websites can use funnel analysis to see how many are actually downloading the files and what genres are mostly preferred by the audience and how many are downloading the files as intended.
Promotional campaigns (Campaign Monitor)
This is particularly relevant for SaaS companies. Promotional campaigns are specially designed to target relevant audience on the web and to boost conversions. It focuses closely on how efficiently the visitors are completing the desired action — sign ups, purchase etc.
For example: A standard campaign scenario looks like
Landing page → home page → product page → pricing page → sign up/purchase
In the above instance, you may want to know how many actual visitors are navigating from the landing page to product page, checking the price and finally signing up. By using funnel analysis here, you can find out how the visitors navigate through these pages and drop off at each page.
For eg. If there are a lot of drop offs from the pricing page, it becomes quite evident that there is something on the pricing page which is not appealing to your customers and needs immediate attention.
Job Portals (Naukri, Indeed)
I wonder: How a specific job portal can become a top hire? To reach this point how effective they need to be and how well their engagement tactics should be?
For these type of portals, where continuous engagement brings a big difference, funnel analysis can be used. In order to run a successful funnel analysis on a job portal, fixed and promising strategies have to be followed.
For example: You have a funnel test running on these pages…
Basic information → Educational qualifications → Previous Job Experiences → Upload Resume → Apply for a Job
Running a funnel analysis here, will indicate the pain points faced by job seekers. Using the data from the analysis, you will be able to structure the pages in such a way that it becomes very easy for job seekers to fill up and start applying.
The scenarios outlined above are a few amongst numerous instances where funnel analysis can be used. There are many different practices for growing your conversion rate but choose the best proposition for your audience. Small hinges may have a huge effect on your website conversion rates.
Hence use funnel analysis to find out all such hinges and make continuous improvements to yield bigger impact on your website conversion rate.