As an eCommerce retailer, do you know what your customers are doing when they visit your site? Do you know where your site is losing visitors, or do you understand where prospects are landing on your landing pages in the sales funnel? If you answered no to any of these questions, there’s a good chance you need to take some time to understand your customer’s journey through your eCommerce site.
While this may seem like a daunting prospect, it can be approached methodically and made simple with the use of tools like Google Analytics. The time and effort invested in this process can also unlock a number of benefits, the most notable of which is the potential to increase conversions by reducing friction and plugging funnel leaks.
What is your client looking for?
If you can understand what your customer is looking for at each stage of their visit to your site, you’ll be better able to deliver relevant information. Are you looking for a product? Looking to compare prices? Do they need help making a decision or are they doing research for a future purpose?
Your funnel must filter customers at every stage of this journey; Being able to identify the stage the visitor is in means you’ll be in a better position to provide the content they need to move through the funnel and closer to purchase.
How can you make your customer’s journey easier?
If you have Google Analytics set up on your site (and you should), you’ll have access to a wealth of data related to customer behavior. Upload the Behavior Flow report on the Behavior tab. This shows the progress of visitors through your site, from the pages they enter, the path they take, where they go back and where they leave. You can use this to determine what keeps users interested and where potential problems exist.
A heat map is also useful here: it will show where most of the interest is concentrated on a page. If this shows an intensity of action towards the bottom of the page, simply moving that element to the top could smooth out the visitor’s path through the site.
Tracking and monitoring of visitor behavior
Keeping an eye on new versus returning visitors is a useful exercise, but you should also combine this with the source of those visits. What type of device are visitors using to access your site? Knowing this, along with the other points mentioned above, can help you tailor your offer to best suit the behavior of your visitors. If you have a high proportion of visitors who log in from a mobile device, for example, you can focus your efforts on building a site optimized for mobile conversions with features that make the customer journey easier on a smartphone (such as faster page load speeds). prompts, larger buttons, click-to-call, shorter forms, and mobile payment options).
Knowing how your visitors behave means you can tailor your site accordingly, making you much more likely to retain those customers and get more conversions.