Understanding and optimizing the flow of your visitors is of paramount importance to improving the commercial performance of your online activity. Knowing this well can help you take the right steps to convert your prospect into a customer. This allows you to see where you are performing and where there is still improvement.
What is a Conversion Funnel?
A conversion tunnel (also called a conversion funnel) represents the journey of Internet users for a given task. In the case of a merchant site, this action usually corresponds to an act of purchase. The conversion tunnel then matches a succession of pages that the buyer leads to the purchase confirmation page. This usually takes the form of a funnel (hence the term conversion funnel) because between each step, Internet users can stagger their journey. As you may have understood, it is therefore a question of keeping them captive at each stage or improving their practices in each of them to increase their conversion rate.
General representation of a conversion tunnel for a merchant site.
How to analyze your conversion tunnel?
Knowing and analyzing your conversion funnel makes it possible to determine the most effective levers of action to drive conversions for your objectives. You are more or less proficient in certain stages and hence you have to choose the stages in which you are least efficient in priority. Thus, by analyzing each stage of the tunnel, it is possible to determine which page you “lose” your visitors the most. The best way to do this is to first calculate the effective conversion rate between each page.
To be able to analyze this, it is necessary to use a web analytics tool like the popular Google Analytics or the French AT Internet. You’ll be able to assess where the biggest loss of your traffic is and work on it with a testing tool like AB Tasty.
Example of a “page to page” conversion in the merchant site conversion funnel:
From the beginning of the act of purchase (other than the basket), we see that the biggest loss to potential buyers, in the example we have given, is at the time of identification. Therefore it will be necessary to find areas for improvement that will make it possible to close the leak and increase the change of this page. The concepts are also numerous: they can be graphic elements that disturb the navigation of the net surfer, text, requested information, buttons … Any element of the page can be the object of improvement. Assurance elements can help improve its conversion tunnel, for example: whether the logo of the means of payment is accepted, the organization that secures the transaction, the methods of delivery, or even the freebies of the products. Return.
To test, test and improve
Once vanishing points and areas of improvement have been identified, it is important to test your hypothesis to avoid disappointment. To do this, new, easy-to-use tools have emerged. They allow you to apply changes to your pages in a matter of minutes… and specifically test your hypotheses to identify which versions of your pages convert best!
This is how you can test new buttons, text or even different page structures in your conversion tunnel. A trader can also test his reinsurance lever so that the purchase can be done with complete peace of mind. Of course, the higher your traffic, the more meaningful the insight into the changes will be.
Thus we can accurately analyze how visitors react to pages and earn, as we move forward, conversion points and therefore logically sales. Constant testing is also essential, because as soon as a page is modified, there is an effect of “tiredness” that appears after some time. As do physical stores where the windows are regularly refurbished to introduce new styles, new collections, and keep customers coming back.
Example of a merchant site and potential additional business based on points earned on its conversion rate:
(average basket: 82 euros)