 Most marketers tend to focus on the campaign click-through as if it is the be-all and end-all of success. But in reality, the click-through simply whisks visitors onto your site, where the hard work really begins. What happens between the moment visitors arrive and the moment they either convert or leave?
Here's how to optimize email and PPC conversion paths so your tactics pay off past the click-through.
Why the Click-Through Tells Only Half the Story
Let's say you send out two B2B email campaigns. Campaign A has twice the click-through rate of Campaign B. If you stop at the click-through, Campaign A is the clear winner. But now let's factor in the desired conversion action: filling out a lead-generation form. When you count the actual number of leads, it turns out that Campaign A and Campaign B both generated 100 leads – making them equally successful at driving you to your ultimate goal.
The same concept holds true in search marketing. Imagine that two PPC campaigns lead to an e-commerce landing page. Their click-through rates and number of clicks are nearly identical, but when you crunch the revenue numbers, you find that campaign B delivered 25 percent more in gross sales than campaign A.
In both cases, the click-through stats alone don't predict ultimate campaign success. It's the bottom-line conversion stats, such as number of leads or amount of revenue, that tell you which campaign worked hardest where it really counted. But even knowing that isn't enough, because you're left with question marks between the click-through and the conversion.
Why did one campaign convert better than the other? What can you do to make the site work as hard for Campaign A as it does for Campaign B?
The answers can be found all along your campaign click path, you just have to know where to look.
Follow the Click Path All the Way to the Conversion
Your click path is exactly what it sounds like – it's the path that leads from your email or PPC click-through to the initial landing page, then from the landing page to wherever you want the next click to take you, until you reach the final step in the conversion process, such as a thank-you page or order-confirmation page.
For example, a lead-generation conversion path is usually straight forward – perhaps a single landing page where the visitor fills out a form, then a thank-you page. An e-commerce path might be a little more involved – a landing page with items to buy, a shopping cart once you've selected your items, a page to input credit-card and shipping information, and then a final confirmation page.
Use your Web-analytics tool to review:
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Landing-page bounce rates. In the Web-analytics world, a bounce – also called a short visit by some tools – is someone who arrives at a page and then exits, without visiting any additional pages on the site. High bounce rates or short visits are generally an indication that visitors arrive on your landing page expecting one thing, and they get another. Virtually all Web-analytics tools prominently display the bounce rate, exit rate or short-visit rate on every page.
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Overall abandonment rates. Abandonment is when a visitor leaves the site before the final conversion step. You can calculate this by creating a funnel report in your Web-analytics software, where the funnel starts at the initial landing page and ends at the goal page, generally your thank-you page or confirmation page.
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Soft goals. Every person will not follow your desired conversion path all the way to the end, but many will do something that may lead to a future conversion. For example, they may download a white paper, subscribe to your newsletter or spend a long time reading certain product pages. Look at an overlay report for each page in your conversion path to see which secondary links visitors are clicking on and how these secondary pages promote your soft goals.
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Distractions. Sometimes your visitors wander off the conversion path, but not in the direction of a soft goal. Are they going to the careers, privacy policy, shipping policy or about us pages – then leaving your site? That qualifies as a distraction. Your overlay report will help you identify where your visitors are getting distracted, so you can remove those links from your conversion pages.
Analyze and Optimize Based on Conversion Behavior
So know that you know which metrics to review, here are a few common-sense ways to interpret the numbers and figure out what to optimize.
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What's my average conversion rate? It's important to compare apples to apples by creating segments such as all email campaigns or all PPC campaigns, because different types of campaigns have wildly different conversion rates.
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Is this campaign a winner or a loser? Compare how an individual campaign stacks up against other campaigns of its same type. If your campaign has a much higher bounce rate than normal, it may be a sign that your campaign and landing-page messaging are at odds with each other.
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Is something wrong with the overall conversion path or with the campaign? Compare all visitors to visitors from a particular campaign or type of campaign. For example, if all visitors have a high abandonment rate on the shipping page, you might rethink the page content, navigation or design. But if email visitors have a much higher abandonment rate than everyone else, it might be because your email promises free shipping, and the page doesn't.
Now you're ready to make changes to your conversion pages. What happens if you remove that distracting link? What happens if you change the landing-page headline? What happens if you create a more relevant landing page for a campaign with a high bounce rate?
You can easily discern which changes work best by split testing. Just send half of your campaign visitors to one version of the page and the other half to another, and then compare the results.
Taking the Question Mark Out of the Conversion
When you look at the entire conversion path – not just the campaign click-through – you take a lot of the guesswork out of campaign effectiveness. You can spot the obstacles on your site that may be preventing visitors from reaching your conversion goal. And ultimately, you ensure that your site works as hard to convert visitors as your campaign did to attract them in the first place.
This funnel report from Lyris HQ shows the click path for a specific landing page, and calculates the conversion rates for two different segments, PPC visitors and email visitors.
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About the Authors
Dan Miller is professional services and sales engineering manager at Lyris. He helps companies adopt data driven marketing techniques to improve their ROI.
Jack Diego is a product manager for Lyris HQ Web Analytics. He seeks to integrate analytics into Lyris HQ so well that you’re using Web analytics without even knowing it.
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