Sandor's Online Marketing

Using Web Analytics to Uncover Problem Pages on Your Site

Landing page optimization and testing can often produce double-digit conversion rate improvements that help transform the economics of an online business.

Given that, I’m often asked. “How do I get ideas for what to improve or test?” A starting point is web analytics related to your website’s content, which can provide many important clues to uncover and prioritize potential problems. Here’s a checklist for reviewing your site’s content.

Most visited contentThe popularity of a webpage helps you to understand whether it is getting the proper exposure. If a key page is not getting enough traffic, it may be necessary to move it to a more prominent location on your site, or to create more links to it from other popular pages.

Path analysisPath analysis allows you to see the sequences of pages that visitors use to traverse your site. It shows you the most common flows of traffic. It may be possible to change the position of key conversion pages or links within the site to benefit from such “drive-by” visibility.

Top entry pagesA list of the top entry pages shows you the point of first contact with your site. Generally, the more traffic that is hitting a landing page, the more attention that page deserves in terms of conversion tuning. Traffic levels can help you to prioritize which landing pages need to be fixed first.

Top exit pagesExit pages are the places where visitors leave your site. Each exit page can be viewed as a leaky bucket. If visitors exit your site, they probably did not find what they were looking for. In some cases, there is nothing that you can do about this. But for many of the visitors who left, you could have probably improved the page to provide more relevant information or better navigation.The total number of exits and the exit percentage of a page can be used to prioritize problem pages. The worst-case scenario is a popular entry page that is also a frequent exit page. The bounce rate is the percentage of entry page visitors who leave immediately without visiting any other site content. High bounce rates on high-traffic pages are a red flag indicating that those pages need attention.

Funnel analysisRegardless of your visitors’ initial wandering path on your website, they must often pass through a well-defined series of pages in order to make a purchase. It is possible to see the efficiency of each step in this linear process. The funnel narrows as people drop off during each step. High drop-off percentages may signal that a particular step is especially problematic. If problems are uncovered, they may suggest breaking the process up into smaller and more manageable steps, or simplifying it.Web analytics software [such as Webtrends and Google Analytics] allows you to track conversion rates (CRs) for all of the important goals on your site. Some web analytics tools offer the ability to view reverse goal paths. These are the most common sequences of pages that visitors traversed on their way to completing a conversion goal, whether it’s signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. Unlike forward-looking funnel analysis, reverse goal paths look backward at the most popular points of origin for a conversion.By using these web analytic reports, you can discover unexpected ways that visitors are converting – and not converting – to sales and further evaluate the effectiveness of your web pages.

Source: Paypal
Author’s note: Tim Ash is the CEO of SiteTuners and the author of the bestselling bookLanding Page Optimization.