Imagine yourself carrying a bucket full of water from the well. Now, picture small holes appearing in your bucket. Slowly, the water begins to leak out as you walk home. There’s still some water left when you arrive, but it’s clear you didn’t carry the amount you could have.
The leaking bucket is just a metaphor for your sales funnel, the path visitors take from the moment they arrive at your store until they complete a purchase. Leaks in the sales funnel can be a real reason for the success or failure of your business.
How to Find Leaks in Your Sales Funnel
There are three Google Analytics reports related to tracking your sales funnel that you can use to find leaks in your funnel:
Funnel Visualization Report (Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualization). This is the most straightforward primary report, which gives you a visual overview of your funnel based on the specified goal.
Goal Flow Report (Conversions > Goals > Goal Flow). This displays the most accurate conversion path. Additionally, it’s more flexible than the Funnel Visualization, as it allows you to use advanced segments and compare dates.
Reverse Goal Path Report (Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path). This shows you the actual funnels. Here, you’ll discover funnels you didn’t even know existed. Simply put, you will see the three pages that were visited before the conversion.
When reviewing these reports, ask yourself where visitors are frequently dropping out of the funnels. These are the “leaks” that you need to fix. To improve your conversion rate, you’ll need to know how to plug those leaks and keep more visitors in your funnels.
Among these three reports, you should be able to quickly spot any issues within your sales funnel. So, how can you metaphorically plug the leaks? “In God we trust; all others bring data.”
As the engineer and author W. Edwards Deming said, “In God we trust; all others bring data.” The first step is to conduct quantitative and qualitative research to understand why the gaps exist and how to best plug those gaps.
How to Conduct Quantitative Research
Quantitative research is digital and objective. It aims to uncover the “what” behind visitor and customer behavior. In conversion rate optimization, quantitative research usually refers to one of the following methods:
Technical analysis. If your store isn’t functioning well, it won’t achieve a good conversion rate. This is an absolute rule. While it’s easy to think that everyone is using the latest version of our favorite browser or operating system, the reality is more complex. You may have a shiny new iPhone, but someone is still using a Nokia 3310 from 2017.
Technical analysis allows you to understand these different types of visitors and buyers and largely covers three foundational concepts:
Cross-browser and device compatibility testing. This is the process of ensuring that your store functions correctly across as many browsers and devices as possible, which is not an easy task. The trick is that each browser and device has many versions, and it’s very easy to postpone updating those versions. Thus, you cannot assume everyone is using the latest version.
You can use a tool like BrowserStack and your favorite analytical tool to speed up the process. With Google Analytics, for example, you can navigate to two important reports: Audience > Technology > Browser & OS and Audience > Mobile > Devices. Switch from data view to comparison mode to see how browsers and devices vary against each other. Just make sure to compare within the same family (e.g., Android to Android, Chrome to Chrome).
Optimization
mobile experience. Mobile is something entirely different. It’s important to keep this in mind when optimizing the mobile experience. What people want and need on mobile is completely different from what they want and need on desktop. Intentions, motivations, and contexts all change. A good mobile experience is not just a desktop experience on a smaller screen; it’s an inherently good mobile experience. Don’t let a bad mobile experience ruin your entire sales funnel.
Optimize page speed. If your site is too slow, you will lose visitors before you can market to them. If you are using Google Analytics, you can use the Behavior > Site Speed > Page Timings report to identify slow pages. Then, run those pages through PageSpeed Insights for tips on how to improve page speed.
How to Conduct Qualitative Research
Qualitative research is exploratory and personal in nature. It aims to uncover the “why” behind visitor and customer behavior. In conversion rate optimization, qualitative research typically refers to one of the following methods:
Site surveys. You’re likely already familiar with site surveys. These surveys appear while you browse various websites, encouraging you to answer a quick question. For example, here is a site survey used by Asics:
There are two main types of site surveys:
Exit surveys. These surveys are triggered when a visitor is about to leave, such as hovering over the browser’s taskbar. This is your opportunity to gather feedback and insights from visitors before they leave. Exit surveys can be particularly powerful when used on paid customers.
Page surveys. These surveys are triggered when a visitor visits the page, either immediately or after a set period (like 30 seconds). This is your chance to gather feedback and insights from visitors who are still browsing. With site surveys, you want to focus on extracting actionable data. The best way to do this is by identifying specific friction points on the site.
In the Asics example above, visitors are asked to rate their experience on a scale from 1 to 10. It would be difficult for Asics’ marketing department to extract any meaningful data from the survey results. The results will tell the team how their store is performing overall, but they won’t help them pinpoint friction, meaning they won’t help them improve the store experience.
Site surveys work best when they are employed qualitatively, meaning asking an open-ended question that allows for stories and explanations.
Here are some suggested friction-focused questions for site surveys:
What is the purpose of your visit to our site? Were you able to complete your task? If not, why? Is there anything hindering you? Do you have any unanswered questions?
Site surveys work best when:
You ask one open-ended question. You ask a yes/no question and then request clarification or elaboration after submission.
Don’t forget to use site survey responses to enhance the customer voice text on your site.
How to Conduct Qualitative Research
Nothing can replace the phone call and talking with your customers. If you can meet with your paid customers in person, that’s much better.
There are a million questions you can ask to get to the heart of your customers and why they really buy from you. What’s important is that you enter the interviews prepared and well-equipped to discover insights.
This means:
Selecting the right participants. Not all customers are equal. Often, you’ll get the best insights from current customers, repeat customers, and past customers. The question you are trying to answer or the problem you’re trying to solve can help determine which of those customer groups you should interview.
Asking
The appropriate questions. There is no short list of questions that should always be asked in customer interviews. Stick to short open-ended questions. Make sure to eliminate cognitive biases and assumptions from your questions. Before asking questions about the solutions you provide, ensure you understand the problem your customers are facing. Often, interview questions that focus on the problem are the most inspiring, not those that focus on the solution. Finally, it’s not all about the questions; you can ask participants to engage in role plays or conduct demonstrations, etc.
Documenting interviews properly. Notes can be helpful, but you want to make sure you also recorded the interviews. Transcribe them using a service like Rev. Record audio, video, and written notes during the interview. If you are conducting the interview in person, it’s best to enlist a temporary assistant who can help you with documentation. It’s hard to communicate with the participant and engage with them well while at the same time worrying about documentation.
After the interviews, review the documents and reflect on what you’ve learned. It helps to create a hypothesis about what you think is true before conducting the interviews so you can validate or refute it through research. This information can be used to improve the marketing funnel and the sales funnel overall where applicable.
Reducing sales funnel leaks
There will always be leaks in the funnel. Finding and serving the right customers is difficult. Sometimes, you might feel like you have plugged one leak only to find two more. But the more effectively you can plug leaks when you discover them, the better each trip to the well will be.
Don’t exhaust yourself running from the well to home (i.e., sending more and more visitors to a leaking funnel). Instead, focus on keeping your bucket in good shape. It will require ongoing maintenance, but it will be worth it to keep that water (money) in the bucket, ultimately leading to more conversions, customers, and sales.
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/conversion-funnel-leaks
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