Increase your website conversion rates

Optimise your website navigation and minimise drop-offs.

Driving relevant visitor traffic to your website is of paramount importance, however keeping them there is vital.

Optimising your website navigation, so that visitors can find what they are looking for quickly and easily, is key to satisfying your online visitors and will minimise your website drop-offs, resulting in increased conversions and revenue.

This article will outline the optimisation of website navigation, providing an overview of what is involved when optimising your site navigation and minimising drop-offs. It should be used as an informative piece, giving an introduction to the process of investigating drop-offs and optimising site navigation accordingly.

Business Goal

• To increase your visitors' satisfaction by helping them find what they are looking for in as few clicks as possible

• To increase your website's success by minimising unnecessary drop-offs, and getting more visitors to complete desired actions such as filling out online forms or purchasing your products, ultimately generating more leads, customers, and revenue for your organisation.

Common Terminology

Drop-offs - refers to the event of a visitor leaving your website, possibly because they have been unable to locate what they were looking for.

Page Tags - refers to tags placed in the html of a web page for the purpose of data collection. They are particularly useful for tracking client side data. For example, with page tags you can track a visitor’s usage of the web browser’s back button, their screen resolution and the browser they are using.

Query Strings - refers to the code inserted after the “?” in a URL (for example www.anysite.com/page.?name=value). They are a powerful technique to use when tracking and measuring the effectiveness of a particular online marketing campaign.

Web Server Logfiles - refers to the capture of a host of information surrounding an individual hit or visit, such as the requesting client IP address, requested URL, referring URL and the date/time of the request.

Please refer to our Glossary of Terms section for further web analytics terms.

Visitor Clickstream

Most modern websites feature top or side menus, which help to structure the site and provide quick access to specific content areas. Any given page can typically be reached via hyperlinks from multiple other pages. For this reason, the resulting navigational structure of the website forms a network of linked pages rather than resembling a top-down, tree structure.

A visitor’s path or clickstream may begin on an entry page on the website, and follow unpredictable, even cyclical patterns. Along the way, visitors may use the web browser’s back button, to back track a few steps and continue in a different direction. The last page that is viewed in the visit to a website is called the exit page. The number of visited in a path is referred to as the length or depth of the path.

Affinium NetInsight Path Report

Below is an example Affinium NetInsight diagram showing a path report for a homepage, showing you where visitors went after visiting the homepage. This particular report gives you a top level view of visitor clickstream, which can be easily identified and investigated in more detail.

Most Common Challenges

• Most website traffic analysis solutions only store paths up to a limited length (discarding additional page views in longer paths), and therefore don't allow you to retrieve reports that accurately contain all of the visits that include all the pages you specify.

• Paths over dynamic website pages require the inclusion of the relevant portions of the query strings in order to be meaningful.

Measuring a visitor's clickstream

Affinium NetInsight can record the entire path of each visitor through the website without imposing any practical limits on the length of each path. Affinium NetInsight’s series of Path summaries can either aggregate common trends across visitor segments or display the entire individual paths of visitors who are of interest.

Furthermore, using Affinium NetInsight’s option to declare any of a website’s pages as dynamic pages, Affinium NetInsight can be prompted to include the query string in the path analysis of those dynamic pages. Affinium NetInsight’s URL search & Replace functionality allows users to clean query strings of obstructing information such as session identifiers.

Finally, Affinium NetInsight’s Data Conduits allow users to translate query-string codes such as “ContentID=1234” into meaningful page titles such as in the example below.

Combining all of these capabilities, users can run many types of Affinium NetInsight Path summaries to analyse behaviour, such as visits starting on a particular page, continuing through and particular destination page, or spanning between any two pages.

Investigating the Data

It is possible to investigate, in countless ways, the navigation patterns of specific visitor segments which are of interest to you. For example:

• You can filter a path summary report to investigate the behaviour of specific segments of visitors, such as those coming to the website after clicking a paid listing on Google, searching for say colour copiers, or entering the website on a specific page.
• Using a summary report, a simple drill-down will reveal the entire clickstream of a selected visitor, giving you a sample to examine.
• With scenario reports such as the example below from Affinium NetInsight, you can define and track higher level, business-event paths.

Affinium NetInsight Sales Funnel

Below is An Affinium NetInsight Sales Funnel diagram showing customers moving through pre-defined and customisable online sales stages.

SCL Analytics

Properly managing your web data analysis and assimilating this information into your business requires time, focus and expertise.

At SCL we offer a complete web analytics solutions package. As well as supplying the software required to successfully deliver comprehensive reports and analysis, SCL also provide a professional consultation service designed to meet the individual needs of your business.

Our consultants have a wealth of knowledge, experience and expertise in delivering web analytics and monitoring solutions. They will work closely with you, understanding your business goals and helping you to get the full benefit of the powerful solutions we provide. This will ultimately aid you in getting the most out of your website investment for your business.

How SCL Analytics can help

Affinium NetInsight (higher traffic volumes) and Unica NetTracker (lower traffic volumes) offer a powerful web analytics solution, enabling you to gather and investigate the information required to successfully optimise your website navigation and minimise website drop-offs.

Contact us to find out more about our web analytics solutions and how they can help you increase conversion rates.