This post is Part II of a series that discusses the online customer acquisition funnel and how to improve conversion rates. The customer acquisition funnel is a construct that helps visualize the junctions at which an online portal looses the attention of a visitor.
A side note about online shopping cart abandonment… Wouldn’t it be interesting if people behaved the same way in a real store as they do online? I could imagine people at the grocery store piling a basket high with goods and then for whatever reason just ditching it in an aisle and then running out the store. Most cases one would think, “What was that all about?!!”. That’s pretty much what happens in the E-Commerce world, whether it is shopping cart abandonment or at the landing page.
In this post I will be talking mainly about landing pages. Landing pages are the first thing that a user sees when they access your portal. This might be your main page, or if you are savvy, it might be a personalized page based on the traffic driver that brought the user to the site. As a general rule of thumb, you have about 3 seconds to grab the user’s attention before they decide to click the back button. In analytics terms, the rate of ‘back button pushing’ is called the landing page bounce rate and is defined as (Visitors who leave on landing page) / (Total visitors to landing page).
Ideally, you would want to have a landing page bounce rate associated with each “high traffic” landing page on your website. This allows you to get a picture of not only which landing pages are working but which traffic drivers are driving qualified visitors to your site who are interested in the products you are trying to sell. However, in order to disambiguate the influence of each factor on the bounce rate, it will take a little analytics.
Landing page optimization can loosely be categorized into two classes: 1) Subjective optimization based on design, usability or other bases such as our perception of the users intended goals; and 2) Mathematical optimization based on analytical models and behavioral data. The most powerful landing page optimization schemes utilize both simultaneously.
I have always found the mathematical optimization portion quite interesting because it allows you to test several different design scenarios on a population of people. This can produce some very interesting results as populations of human beings can sometimes behave in unanticipated ways. For instance, you might find that increasing the size of the title font from 16 to 18 on the landing page decreases the bounce rate by 5%. Does it make any sense? I say no, but it is sure easy to conjecture some reason after you have the answer!
The best way I have found of performing these types of mathematical optimizations is through multivariate statistics. This class of statistics differs from split A/B testing, which is the testing of two different scenarios during a single experiment, in that it allows you to test multiple variables at one time without a huge magnification in the number of behavioral samples you need to capture. For instance, you can test the title font height, background color, header image and body text in a single experiment. Simply speaking, strict A/B testing would require four separate experiments.
The combination of subjective landing page optimization with mathematical optimization allows you to finely tune your landing pages to decrease bounce rates. It also allows you to disambiguate the influence between a traffic driver and the actual landing page on the bounce rate. If you then perform these optimization exercises on all of the high-traffic landing pages, a picture begins to emerge as to which design elements are working, which ones are not, which audiences need to see what content and how to best capture their attention. This then sets you up for being able to personalize content and user experience based on the traffic driver source and other user specific incoming information.
Since the landing page is the first and largest junction in the ‘Acquisition Funnel’, changes as small as a percent in bounce rate can have dramatic effects on the downstream number of visitors who become engaged in the site. I can’t stress enough how important it is to get a landing page optimization program in place and get it done correctly.
