Online retailers are particularly sensitive to the effectiveness of their online checkout process. The measurement metric of shopping cart abandonment is a no brainer — if people abandon a virtual trolley piled high with goodies prior to check out, the till does not ring and marketing expenses incurred in attracting customers in the first place are wasted. It is therefore logical that online retailers are sensitive to the effectiveness of a particularly important conversion path metric, that of shopping cart abandonment. The value of conversion paths in general is not limited to ecommerce websites and any website proprietor should have a clue of what they want website visitors to do once they arrive. If the website does not have clearly structured conversion paths, the potential customer is expected to click around and find value for themselves. In many cases, this is asking too much.

So, what is a conversion path?

In essence, it is a defined number of steps, represented by individual web pages or actions, on the way to a goal, or conversion. If you want to generate sales enquiries from your website, your conversion path might look something like this:

Summary page with a few options: Display a summary listing of products and services so that the prospect can easily see the type of products and services offered at a glance.

Display detail on an individual offer: Show the product or service details for selected item. In addition to detailed product or service information, have a clear “call to action” that is easy to see and click on.

Have a simple contact form with the minimum number of contact fields required.

Conversion paths are not limited to sales enquiries or online purchases. Other conversion goals could include newsletter sign ups, online event registration, profile creation and a host of other goal-orientated actions. What all these examples have in common is that there is a beginning and an end, and the end represents a desired outcome that can be measured and is meaningful.

A good way to visualise a conversion path is as a funnel. A common example would be making an offer on a service or product with the desired outcome being that people complete and submit a contact form. It is easy to measure how many people enter the funnel at step one, possibly a summary or showcase of what you are offering. You can then also see how many of those step one prospects move to step two where they interact with further information on a particular product or service, and then see which products or services generate the most interest. Step three is seeing how many people act on your proposition by filling in and submitting the contact form.

This simple three step process will give you a very stark view of the effectiveness of the conversion path that you have defined. If only a small percentage of the people that enter step one pop out the bottom of the funnel in the form of a lead, then there may be an opportunity to improve the set up of the conversion path and see if results improve. Regardless of the initial conversion path results, the outcome gives you a baseline for structuring and improving conversion paths.

Ongoing testing of different pages set ups, content and messaging permutations and creative elements and physical conversion path actions will facilitate quicker learning and provide rapid improvements, despite the changes seeming quite small and incremental.

But why go to all the effort?

Increasing website traffic costs money. Regardless of the value of the marketing spend, it is logical and prudent for anyone to want to improve the number of conversions (read business objectives) that are achieved from a fixed marketing budget. After all, this is an opportunity to directly link spend to effectiveness, which is not often available for advertisers using other mediums. The worst case scenario is increasing traffic to your website and decreasing conversions. Put simply, you are effectively attracting people to your website but due to your poor or unconvincing conversion path, you are not converting them according to your upfront objectives. Allow this to happen and you will be sending your competitors your traffic.

Creating effective conversion paths makes good business sense and should be fundamental to all your online marketing and advertising discussions. This approach currently represents the road less travelled, but the logic is sound and the evidence irrefutable. Make sure that the paths that your business takes are the ones paved with gold.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Perspective, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.