The Importance of Understanding Your Customer Journey on Your Ecommerce Website
As an ecommerce retailer, do you know what your customers are doing when they visit your site? Do you know where your site is losing visitors, or do you know where potential customers land on your landing pages in the sales funnel? If you answered no to any of these questions, chances are good that you need to take some time to understand your customer’s journey through your ecommerce site.
While this may seem like a daunting prospect, it can be approached methodically and made easier with the use of tools like Google Analytics. The time and effort invested in this process can also unlock a number of benefits, the most notable of which is the ability to increase conversions by reducing friction and plugging funnel leaks.
What is your customer looking for?
If you can understand what your customer is looking for at each stage of their visit to your site, you will be better able to deliver relevant information. Are you looking for a product? Do you want to compare prices? Do they need help making a decision or are they researching for a future purpose?
Your funnel should filter customers at every stage of this journey; Being able to identify the stage the visitor is in means they will be in a better position to provide the content they need to move through the funnel and closer to purchase.
How can you make your customer’s journey easier?
If you have Google Analytics set up on your site (and it should be), you will have access to a wealth of data related to customer behavior. Upload the Behavior Flow report to the Behavior tab. This shows visitors’ progress through your site, from the pages they enter, the route they take, where they go back, and where they leave. You can use this to determine what keeps users interested and where there are potential problems.
A heat map is useful here too – it will show where most of the interest is concentrated on a page. If this shows an intensity of action towards the bottom of the page, simply moving that element towards the top could smooth the path of visitors through the site.
Tracking and monitoring of visitor behavior
Keeping an eye on new versus returning visitors is a useful exercise, but you should also match this with the source of those visits. What type of device do visitors use to access your site? Knowing this, along with the other points mentioned above, can help you tailor your offer to better suit the behavior of your visitors. If you have a large proportion of visitors logging in from a mobile device, for example, you can focus your efforts on creating a site optimized for mobile conversions with features that make the customer journey easier on a smartphone (such as faster page load speeds). faster, bigger buttons, click to call, shorter forms and mobile payment options).
Knowing how your visitors behave means that you can tailor your site accordingly, making you much more likely to retain those customers and get more conversions.
