faulker046

I am sorry to break this news to you but chances are that your conversion numbers are all messed up. Let me demonstrate it with an example. Let’s take a simple conversion process, see the figure below. Let’s assume that you get 100,000 visitors on your site, and 20,000 start the checkout process, 15,000 make it the next step and finally 5,000 end up converting. Based on your web analytics tool your conversion rate will be 5,000/100,000 = 5% . So far everything looks good. But what if your checkout path looks something like this? Do you see the phone number? I bet many customers are using that phone number to complete the purchase. Are you taking those, who call and convert, into consideration when calculating the conversion rate? Do you know that when someone picks up the phone to call he/she has a higher likelihood of converting? Taking the example above, here is how your conversion funnel looks like: Most of the web analytics tools just allow you to see a view of single channel co...

A/B testing and MVT are a great way to help you drive more conversion on your website. A/B testing and MVT help you decide the best layout, headlines, images, message copy etc. that motivates the visitors to complete a transaction. However, A/B testing and MVT will only get you so far. If a visitor does not complete a transaction during later steps of the funnel then there are generally other reasons than those that can be simply fixed by changing the page layout, copy, images etc. . Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that you can’t improve conversions by optimizing later steps of the funnel. You can, but you will get to a point of diminishing return and you will need something else to drive more conversions. Moreover, the learning from A/B and MVT will only help you going forward but you will lose many customers while you are doing the tests. Keep in mind that as a visitor moves down the conversion funnel his/her commitment to complete the transaction (convert) increases. If you ...