Seven Deadly Web Analytics Sins    1    2    3    4    5    6    7

By John Marshall

Deadly Web Analytics Sin #3: The Linear Funnel
Executives love funnel reports because they look so easy to understand, with their clearly defined exit points. But regrettably they're often misleading, because they don't expose the underlying human behavior. Don't believe for a moment that the path from 'nice to meet you' to 'thanks for your purchase' is a straight line.

A sales funnel shows:

• The number of visitors that arrive at your site, and out of those, how many become interested in your products
• And out of those who become interested, how many placed a product (or products) in their cart
• And of those who placed a product in their cart, how many actually purchased

It doesn't show what's happening behind the scenes...

Fatal Funnel Flaw
The problem with simple funnels is that they impose a linear flow on the user's actions. According to a simple funnel, a user either advances to the next stage, or exits to something outside the funnel. The reality is much more complicated. People click around on countless links, noodle around on product pages looking for the configuration that best suits their needs, compare products, and then finally place an item into the cart. Then they change their mind.

Once the item is in their cart, another flurry of activity occurs. The almost-buyer begins to mull the decision over, decides to check the return policy, shipping charges and how quickly they'll receive the item. Some of this activity may require them to leave the shopping cart pages. Is that an exit from the funnel? Not necessarily.

Non-linearity is the foundation on which the web was built. It allows people to freely click from page to page within a web site—or to actually head over to a completely different web site—in any order they see fit. Reigning in useable data requires a visualization method that acknowledges a basic flow forward through the funnel from stage to stage, while correctly showing that users click where they want to, and are glorious, unpredictable, fickle and non-linear beasts.

Exacerbating this flaw is the fact that different groups of visitors behave within the funnel in radically different ways. Visitors from a PPC campaign have no relationship with you yet; those from an e-mail campaign probably do. The behavior here is so polarized that you can't extract meaningful data from a funnel unless you can view and compare those visitor segments, side by side

The Light at the End of the Funnel
An effectively designed funnel report solves the fatal funnel flaw in three ways. First, it provides a visualization of which pages encourage forward motion into the funnel, without attempting to show the order of those pages within a particular funnel stage. This is done by calculating which pages are 'persuasive,' meaning that when visitors see that particular page, they are more likely to advance to the next stage of the funnel.

This visualization more closely matches the underlying behavior: The user clicks around seemingly at random, but when viewing a statistically large enough sample, we can see that some pages are more persuasive than others. The ClickTracks funnel report uses the best visualization technique we've found—we simply add a darker shading to those pages the program finds more persuasive than others.

The second part of the solution is to view your site as page groups rather than individual pages, using a metaphor that collapses many individual pages into larger chunks of data that are easier to understand. For example, all individual products in the product catalog might be collapsed into page groups including product overviews, details and specifications groups.

Finally, the funnel process needs to be viewed for multiple segments simultaneously, side by side. Achieving this requires the overall visualization technique be simple, so that adding multiple segments doesn't greatly complicate the data and make it impossible to derive meaningful information and insights.

Click for the full image.

In the above funnel report snippet, the far left and far right columns show the funnel in the 'traditional' fashion: you see the number of visitors in the stage, and the number that exit. The stages are assumed to be ordered linearly. The individual page groups are shown in center column. (Click the image to get a bigger and more interesting example.)

The data reveals the degree to which each page group influences the user to advance to the next stage, i.e. the persuasiveness. Compared to other page groups, is a user more or less likely to become a customer? For example, imagine our site has a coupon page. We want to know if a visitor seeing the coupon page tends to improve conversion—but we don't really care how people got to it, whether the coupon page was the first page they saw or the thirteenth page they visited right in the middle of the checkout process.

More advanced analysis of the funnel can be performed by applying visitor labeling, just like any other ClickTracks report. The user behavior within the funnel will be very different depending on whether the users are coming from an e-mail campaign, from a paid search ad and so on.

Seven Deadly Web Analytics Sins    1    2    3    4    5    6    7