There’s one fundamental problem that most often leads marketers to re-examine their website: a low conversion rate. If the website overall isn’t converting at a high enough rate, it’s usually a good clue that you need to look into things.
Step 1: Map Your Ideal Conversion Path
For many marketers that means digging into individual web pages that show a low conversion rate. The problem with that approach is that conversion is a journey—and leads don’t go from zero to 100 by looking at one landing page.
“The problem manifests itself in a variety of ways,” our Conversion Rate Expert JL Neilsen explained. “The friction point causing poor conversion may be at the start of the funnel, somewhere in between, or on the last step. The key is to track the journey.”
That’s why diagnosing website problems means looking at the entire buyer’s journey and identifying where visitors diverge from the buyer’s journey you have in mind for them.
Step 2: Look at the Path Users Are Actually Taking and Identify Friction Points
Once you know how you want users to move through your site, you can use Google Analytics’ ‘Behavior Flow’ report to see how they’re actually moving.
Behavior Flow can show you the overall path users are taking through your website. It can also help you identify common drop-off pages where users either leave the site or diverge from the path you’ve set out for them.
For example, you may find that a particular landing page is causing a lot of drop-offs. That may mean the page isn’t well optimized for conversion. But it could also mean that the ad copy leading users to that page isn’t attracting the right users or setting accurate expectations for what they’ll find on the landing page.
Step 3: Run Heatmap — and Other Tests — to Get to the Heart of the Problem
Wherever the typical user flow diverges from your ideal path, that represents a good page for running additional tests, including heatmaps and session recordings. Now, when you look at the heatmap report for that page, you can interpret it within the context of your specific goal for that page and where it sits within the overall journey.
Heatmaps illustrate the frequency of click behavior on different portions of a web page.
Your heatmap report can then tell you where users’ actual click behavior diverges from that journey—and help you identify why.
If you’re using Crazy Egg for heatmapping, you can use additional reports (including the Scrollmap, Confetti, Overlay, and List Reports) to dig into the data even further. For users who don’t follow the ideal path, you can answer key questions like:
- Where are they coming from (by referral source)?
- Are they based in a common geographic region or country?
- Do they include existing customers (who are logged into their accounts)?
- Have they been to your website before or are they new users?
- Are they accessing your site from a particular device or operating system (OS)?
- What search terms are they using that lead them to your site?
The Confetti Report breaks down click behavior by 25 dimensions, including the referring source.
“All this information will help identify the friction points,” JL said. “Once you find the friction points, you can start to understand why they’re happening and brainstorm ideas for how to fix them.”
Using our example from above, if your ad copy is the problem, you’d see very few clicks from users who came from that particular PPC campaign. On the flip side, you may find that it’s users accessing your site from mobile devices that exit the page at a high rate—which tells you there could be a design or functionality issue on the mobile version of that page.
Once you’ve directly identified the problem with your conversion funnel and the individual pages causing friction, now you’re ready to attack the problem and improve your conversion rate.