Part Six in a Series on Analyzing Conversion Funnels and Form Abandonment
Visitor segmentation is a fundamental tool in virtually every web analysis. Take almost technique I’ve ever talked about and it can (and should) be applied within the context of a visitor segmentation. The analysis of conversion processes is no different.
Every aspect of Form Performance is heavily tied to the type of visitors using it. And neglecting to analyze Form Conversion by visitor segment will leave a big part of the picture colorless.
One of the drawbacks to talking about Visitor Segmentation (though I’m going to devote attention to this in the coming weeks) is that most good visitor segments are highly business and site specific. That makes it challenging to talk about them in an interesting but generic fashion.
There are some pieces of most visitor segmentation schemes that are commonly of value in Conversion Process analysis, and I’m going to focus on them. But you’ll still find it worthwhile to look at every aspect of Forms abandonment and Conversion Process KPIs in terms of your business-specific segmentations.
Here are some of the common uses for more generic visitor segmentation in doing funnel analysis:
Isolating Friction in Forms vs. Lack of Sales Reinforcement
Form Friction and Lack of Sales Reinforcement both manifest themselves in terms of abandonment. But you can often isolate them and make their real effect much clearer by focusing on the behavior of visitors who are highly-likely to be committed to your brand (and vice versa). This group will include returning customers and visitors who self-select immediately into your conversion process. You can also isolate committed users based on the extent of previous site behavior (especially for media and social sites analyzing subscription or registration processes). Visitor segments in these segments are committed to completing the process and need little sales reinforcement. Analyzing the form friction for this group will establish the true baseline. Looking at the less-committed visitor segment should provide much better and more informative numbers about lack of sales-reinforcement and directional abandonment. As with so much of web analytics, visitor segmentation is less interesting if you simply take conversion rates and slice them by types. You’ve just learned your most-committed visitors are least likely to abandon your process. Hurrah. It’s in the context of an analytic purpose that visitor segmentation is truly interesting.
First-Timer Form Friction
This is the most basic of all visitor segmentations and while it only applies to certain types of process, it's often surprisingly interesting. If your processes are almost all one-time types of efforts (buy life insurance, generate a lead for a business-to-business purchase, register on a media site) then this won’t be fruitful segmentation. But if you have processes that visitors may repeat more than once (making a purchase, doing a stock trade, loading a video, etc.), isolating the performance of 1st Time Process users is nearly always informative. Repeat process visitors have higher completion rates, faster avg. page times, and different patterns of directional abandonment. If your process gets a substantial mix of first and repeat users, then the averages for nearly Form KPI will be misleading. Avg. Page Time will be a meaningless muddle of fast repeat users and slower first time users. Possible performance and abandonment issues can easily get lost – particularly in cases where a majority of form users are experienced.
Form Navigation and Option Selection
Many conversion processes have alternative navigation strategies and different types of options built into them. Understanding the impact of these options (as well as the take-up rates for Form options) is heavily dependent on visitor segmentation. Both of the generic segmentation strategies I’ve already talked about matter here (new vs. experienced visitors and committed vs. uncommitted) but even more important are your business-specific interest segments. These segments will have dramatically different take-up rates for up-sells or cross-sells presented in the conversion process. Some segments perform better with up-sells/cross-sells and others without. If you evaluate Form Performance “on average” you will significantly mis-optimize the conversion process for key business segments.
Completer Routing
My last post dealt with the importance of holding on to the visitor or messaging the visitor at the completion of a conversion process. It’s often the case that your messaging strategy should be tailored to your key business segments. As with Option Selection, generic segments may also be interesting but are less likely to provide strong analytic differentiation. Carrying visitor segmentation all the way through the conversion process into the analysis of routing from Completer’s will improve your understanding of what types of actions might come next.
The importance of applying visitor segmentation isn’t limited to deep-dive analysis. I’ve written recently about the value of applying analytic models to reporting, and I think conversion processes particularly benefit from this. If you are reporting the classic funnel analysis without segmentation, then you’re mis-reporting on the conversion process system. You’re leaving out key variables (visitor types entering the Form) and making it all too likely that report consumers will misuse and misunderstand changes in your KPIs. If process conversion rates have improved because of a change in the mix of visitor types entering the Form, it is absolutely essential that you identify the cause – not simply the existence - of that change!
Previous Posts in this series include:
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