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01.07.08
Analyzing Key Web Site Funnels
 By
Gary Angel
In my first post of the year, I talked about the importance of having a detailed project oriented plan around measurement.
But what kind of projects actually go into a measurement plan?
Obviously, the exact makeup of a plan is highly client-specific. In the past couple of months I've written up measurement projects as diverse as a study of how visitors interested in 2008 election stories could be engaged with a broader news site to an Analytic Report on the key drivers of Newsletter Subscriptions. But there are some projects that go into nearly every company's plans. And one of the most ubiquitous is the study of key funnels on a site.
For a long time, this supposedly simple analysis was THE bellwether web analytics project. It was the analysis that was most often used to justify web analytics and it was the analysis I most often heard vendors and consultants talk about when they trotted out examples of multi-million dollar returns.
All of which is kind of unfortunate, because it's also one of the more misunderstood analytic tasks. The common folk wisdom (as embodied in most expert "best practices") on how to think about and measure Funnel Abandonment is deeply flawed. Combine this with unrealistically high expectations (based on largely anecdotal opinion formed in years past when most site conversion funnels WERE really bad) and a strong tendency to do this analysis as a first project and you have an excellent recipe for failure.
That being said, Funnel Analysis is important. It may the single most important piece of many governmental form-based sites. Funnel Analysis is a vital part of any eCommerce site. It is a central analysis for service-based Financial Services sites in Insurance, Banking and Brokerage. And even for content and community sites, there are nearly always key funnels that are fairly important in terms of overall site performance.
So I thought I'd tackle a short, analysis focused series on the basics of measuring site funnels. I'll begin the true analytic part of the series in my next post - when I'll take a close look at Form Abandonment by Step - the classic conversion funnel analysis. Following that, I'm going to cover some of the key behavioral questions you can answer about key funnels and how to tackle each. That will probably cover three or even four posts since there is a fair amount of analytic work around these areas. Finally, I'll cover Funnel Analysis KPIs (since this is an area where analysis should almost always drive to reporting) and also some special cases within conversion analysis.
But before I dive into that, I think it's necessary to give a bit of background on where web analytics fits in the overall process of creating and optimizing conversion processes on a site.
This is definitely an area where web analytics is just one piece of a larger puzzle. There are at least three critical steps in creating good funnel processes on a site: developing and applying good design principles, doing real usability testing and, finally, doing behavioral analysis. I might even be inclined to add a fourth - doing CEM-based analysis driven by customer support and web analytic issues.
Each of these is absolutely essential to building truly world-class conversion or form-based experiences.
When you start any forms-based process, you'll start with business requirements welded to good design principles. The truth is that both behavioral analysis and usability analysis work much better when a Form is relatively well-designed to begin with. It can be nearly impossible to converge on a highly optimized design when the basics of the design are a mess. Critics of multivariate testing often make the very legitimate point that testing may converge on a local optimum and miss much larger opportunities. That's a very fair point - and a poorly conceived overall design can make this ever so likely when it comes to funnel analysis.
Your basic design needs to be responsive to questions like:
• Do the Fields Flow Logically?
• Is all of the necessary information captured (and have extraneous requests been eliminated)?
• Is it easy to navigate to each piece of the Form?
• Is the Screen Performance acceptable?
• Are Lists and Choices presented where appropriate?
• Are Instructions clear and readable?
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Gary Angel is the author of the "SEMAngel blog - Web Analytics and Search Engine Marketing practices and perspectives from a 10-year experienced guru.
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