Lessons

Lesson Info

The Marketing Funnel

friction can live anywhere on your site. One of the best ways us marketers help identify areas for improvement is by leveraging a framework called the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel is a consumer focused model that illustrates the theoretical customer journey towards the purchase of a product or service. At the very top of the funnel we have awareness how many people are aware of your brand or product, how many people know that you exist, awareness is always the first step in any journey towards someone purchasing your product, which is why it's at the very, very top of this framework. The next step in someone's journey towards becoming a customer is interest, then conversion or the actual purchase of your product or service. Then finally, retention and referral. Do your customers keep coming back or do they love you so so much that they refer you to their friends and family friction in your marketing funnel basically means that something is preventing users of your website or ...

app from moving from one stage of the funnel to another. Do you ever wonder how users navigate through your website, how easy or hard it is for them to buy products from you? You can take a qualitative or quantitative approach to this question. Next. I'm going to walk you through some of my favorite tools for understanding my buyer's journey down the marketing funnel on the qualitative side. I'll show you how to use google analytics funnel reporting to understand where users are dropping off in your marketing funnel, Then I'll share with you some of my favorite tools, Kuala Rufer site interception surveys on the qualitative side user testing for remote user feedback and full story for real user playback. Finally, I'll end with hot jar. Hot jar is a little bit of both qualitative and quantitative. And one of my favorite tools to understand how users navigate through my website in this video. I'm going to show you how to use google analytics as a quantitative tool to understand how users are navigating through your website and what areas are areas for improvement where you can make changes to your site to make it more high converting. So this is the main view again of the google analytics demo account, you can access the google analytics demo account by clicking on the links provided in the course folder. You can also google it and you'll be able to easily find it. The section we're gonna cover in this walkthrough today is the conversion section. So I'm going to show you guys two different types of funnel views that you can use to understand user behavior on your site, the first one lives under the conversion types and the conversion tab underneath the gold section. A section that is called funnel visualization. So if you scroll down here and actually before we go down, I'm going to go ahead and change the date up here to reflect The date that I used for the initial calculation of my sites conversion rate, which is 2019. So I'm using a full year's worth of data, so jen 1st december 31st and I'm just going to apply that and if you scroll down you can see uh, that google analytics provides you with a really great visual of how your users are moving through your sales funnel on your site. This is particularly helpful if you're running an e commerce business, but I'm going to show you in a second how you can set up the different stages of your funnel. So whatever business you're running, whatever website you're running, you're able to use this funnel view to track user behavior. So the way that you read this is as follows, um, 94,000 folks entered the funnel or added, added an item to the cart. So 94,328 Did that. And out of those 73, did not complete or move on to the next step which is building and shipping. So you can see here that the sort of like the conversion step step, the conversion of this step or what some marketers would call the micro conversion step is at a 22% here from adding a product to the cart, two proceeding over to the billing and shipping sections. The other interesting thing that you can learn from this report is for the folks who did exit. So the folks who did not move on to billing and shipping, where did they go? So you can see that most of them are 23,000 of them actually exited the site entirely, but there's folks that went to basket, some folks went to sign in, others went back to the store and others went back to the homepage. So you can use this information to inform your strategy as you're thinking about like when folks add information to the cart, um and I may be providing too many opportunities for them to move into a sign in process or to go back to the homepage. How can I provide an experience that limits their ability to leave this funnel and move on to the next funnel stage. And actually that will be uh most of the content that we will cover in this chapter of the course will be focused on the strategies that you can implement to make sure that people move down your purchase funnel. The other thing that I use this report for is to be able to identify what areas um have the lowest conversion or we call these micro conversions, so you can see that from cart to billing and shipping, there's a 22% conversion rate and then from billing and shipping to payment, there's a 56% conversion rate. So that's, you know, that stage is doing much better. But then from billing, apologies from payment to actual review of payment, only 16% of people proceeded. So this is maybe an area of investigation. So maybe um as we go through soon, some of the more qualitative tools that you can use to understand how users navigate through your site. Maybe this is something that you can take a deeper, close closer look into to understand why is it that only 16% of people are moving from the payment stage to the review stage. Maybe there's something happening with the user experience. They're so you might be wondering how you, how you set up or how does google know what the steps are that should be part of this funnel. So that's actually a setting that you can control, you get to set that up yourself. So if you go to admin and then under the admin section of your site, you go to go to your google analytics profile, you go two goals, You'll notice that these are the different goals that you you set up to track different actions that are happening on your site. Uh in other words, these are just convergence really that that the google folks that are running the merchandise store or tracking purchase complete is probably the most important of all conversions. So, and that's that's like the most if you're gonna talk the conversion rate of this site as like a one metric, that's the one definition probably for the google merchandise store. So you can go in to the conversions um goal and then click on gold details and in there you'll see that there's uh you can set up what the different stages of the final are. So down here there's four steps cart billing and shipping, payment and review. These are the exact same steps that we just saw in the final report. Uh and you can see that each of these steps has a different page associated to it. So by page, I mean, you know slash basket dot html slash your info dot html. So this is an important thing for you to to notice and no as you're building your site, if you want to leverage this sort of out of the box functionality for google funnel reports, you need to make sure that each of the steps that you want to measure is a different page with with a different U. R. L. So that you can easily set up this final report. Okay, now I'm going to show you the second type of funnel report that I like to look at which is also in the conversion section. And the reason why I show this, I'm showing this is the second thing is because it's in this e commerce module and the e commerce module is awesome but it is actually a little bit harder to install. We both good and go into the details of installation of google analytics but um I usually just know that it is not an out of the box thing. Um It's a little bit uh it requires a little bit more configuration but in here you can access to funnel reports that I think are really interesting. The first one is this shopping behavior and so in this shopping behavior it's a different visual of the funnel, it's more horizontal, but you can see, you know from all you have all sessions and then you have the sessions that contain a product view and then the sessions that uh or there was something added to the card and then the sessions with the checkout. And so it's a kind of a similar, a similar thing um this time with the sessions and a little bit of a different different settings for what you're actually seeing in the different stages, same thing, you can configure this in the admin section if you decide to use the e commerce module and then this section I think is particularly relevant to this course in the next part of this uh this chapter we're going to be talking about how do you improve the checkout flow as an important way to improve the user experience of your site and lift conversion rates. So if you do decide to go in the direction of improving your checkout flow. This is a really, really great report because it focuses very specifically on the checkout process. Um It allows you to see again the stages from billing to payment to review, uh and then just total number of sessions with the transaction. Okay, so in summary, there are 22 key route funnel reports that I would recommend to use qualitative data to understand how users are navigating through your site and how you what areas are for, right for improvement. The first one lives under the gold section and it's the funnel visualization and this one is installed automatically when you install google analytics in your account. It just requires you to set up these goals, which is fairly easy process. Uh And then the second one, the second reports that I would recommend living the e commerce module uh and they're both shopping behavior and check out behavior. They require a bit more customization but they allow you to go deeper into the checkout experience which as we'll discuss in a minute is a very important aspect of improving conversion rates for your site. Now I'm going to show you other tools you can use in addition to google analytics to understand the way that your users navigate through your site and help you improve conversion rates. This first one is one of my favorite. It's Kuala Russo, the product that they sell is an in app or in website user survey. So the video that you see here on the right is a great example of how Kuala Rue works if you're a user of websites or apps, I'm sure that you have interacted with their products before. Uh They basically pop up a feedback survey in a moment that is interesting or where a company wants to capture uh feedback to understand the experience. The great thing about Kuala Route surveys is that first of all, it's really, really simple to install this product in most websites. So if you use squarespace, Shopify, just really simple installation. Uh and then once you install that you're able to gain real time feedback on your site or app. So if you, let's say you went through the google analytics funnel reports, you identified the stages of your site where you're like, I really need help, let's say between the add to cart step and the actual like, enter the credit card details step of the process. Maybe that's a place where you can insert a Kuala Route survey as a way to get some feedback as to why people might be dropping off in that particular step of the funnel. So, really great product. Really easy to implement. The second recommendation I have for you is a different approach to understanding the way users navigate through your site. And this is remote user feedback. So, the way remote user feedback basically works is that a company like user testing, which is one of my favorites, will recruit folks that fit a specific demographic profile. You would provide that demographic profile to user testing. In other words, you would tell them what types of users you are looking um for feedback from and then they would recruit your users and they would have them walk through your website and sort of narrate their experience as they're doing it. So on your site, as a marketer you would get to see and hear your customers or your prospective customers as they engage with your products with your apps and with your messaging. So you get a lot of real time feedback. I'm just going to play you for a second. Just a quick video of um what user testing or remote user testing looks like for a website like Airbnb for example, I won't play the whole thing but just so you get a sense of the kind of feedback that you would you would get from remote user feedback. So I guess what does the video say here? Why be an Airbnb host? Okay, so I guess that's about hosting rather than actually finding a place to stay interesting to have that video there that talks about hosting rather than actually uh looking for a place to stay. Doesn't seem to go with the rest of the site. It doesn't seem to illustrate the idea of finding a place to stay but she certainly looks like she might be a nice host as well because she's very smiley Okay, next task. And then I'll go into uh okay, so you can see in this video that uh the tasks are set in the top. So if you are a user testing client, you can be very specific about what kind of tasks you want the user to take as they navigate through your site. So that you can get the feedback on the different steps or stages or pages uh that you're most interested in and then you would get a narration such as this one. And this is for sort of an old really old version of Airbnb. But hopefully you get a good sense of what a remote user feedback uh looks like from that video. The third tool I wanted to share is full story. So now we're getting a bit more robust full story. Um They do they're known for real user playback in other words uh similar to the narration style um that we just saw a second ago. This is also a recording of someone going through a session on your site trying to perform a task but it's not narrated. And so uh in there, if you are full story customer, you can access a bunch of different playbacks as what you can see here in in the list such as this. So you can see how folks are navigating through your site, you can identify, you know, I want to see how people are checking out. So in this you have different sessions for people specifically checking out on your site. But full story also provides just a lot of additional analytics. Um and they they have a pretty robust data collection on your site. So they can help you identify uh in the similar way as google analytics. they can help you identify stages in your funnel that are underperforming and help you optimize those. So it's a bit of a combo between quantitative and qualitative information that they provide and then finally hot jar uh this is a really popular one amongst product folks and marketing folks. It's a very robust tool, it provides a lot of insight. So just at a very high level, some of the things that hot jar allows you to do hot jar a lot gives you the ability to do heat mapping, which if you haven't heard what heat mapping is. It basically just lets you understand where people's mouse's hovering on your site. So where does there I go, where does their attention go? So, uh as we as we in the course later talk about encapsulation and some of the design techniques that make for high conversion. This can really help you design just higher converting pages heat mapping. Uh it has a bunch of information around funnel so that visualization that you see appear on top is very similar to what you see in google analytics and it also does recording recordings of user sessions. So very similar as well too. Full story, they also have a suite of options that are similar to Colorado in terms of gathering feedback from surveys and in app and in website surveys. So with hot jar, you kind of get a little bit of the the suite of all products that have to do with understanding and measuring user experience on your site. So if you're running a site with a lot of traffic or if you have a decent budget, I definitely recommend hot jars. The most sort of robust of the series of tools that we just went through using. Any of these tools will help you get an understanding of who your customers are and how they're using your website. Most importantly, you'll know where you have friction in your funnel so you can fix it in the next three sections. I will address three of the most common areas for improvement number one, the checkout process, Number two, site speed and third accessibility. Let's start with the checkout process.