A website can be a very powerful marketing tool. However, in order to maximize a website’s potential, each page needs to be structured in order to move the visitor through the conversion funnel. The conversion funnel is the path that you want the website visitor to follow with the end goal of getting the sale or gaining the lead. For example, you might want your website visitor to read about your company, browse your products or services and finally make the purchase or fill in the contact form.
Unfortunately, the website visitor doesn’t always follow your desired conversion funnel. In order to help determine what is the best conversion funnel for your visitors, you should analyze how past leads/customers proceeded through your website so that you can recreate that flow for more visitors. The graphic below shows a simple analysis of conversions.
Sometimes, your analysis will show a different conversion funnel than what you originally predicted. This may mean that you need to modify your predicted conversion funnel to match the actual conversion funnel.
Once you have defined the conversion funnel that will have the highest chance of success with the majority of users, you need to analyze each page in the flow. Each page should obviously point to the next page in the conversion funnel. If you dropped a visitor onto one of the pages in the funnel, the next step should be painfully obvious.
There are two very important learnings:
- What we think is going to happen is sometimes wrong. It’s the facts of tracking what is actually going on that informs our strategy.
- Each page in the conversion funnel should point to the next page in the flow.
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