From Passerby to Customer (phase 3: choosing)

Stages of customer journey and partial conversions

Each article in this series begins by reiterating the E-commerce Performance Model. This models a typical customer journey of a visitor to your webshop and has 5 phases:

• Coming
• Watch
• Choosing
• Buy
• Returning

Before visitors make a purchase they go through a number of conversion moments: from coming to look, from looking to choosing and from choosing to buying. And because we want to have returning customers, there is also a conversion moment when after purchase the visitor returns to the web shop.

The trick is to see which drivers play a role within these partial conversions. Which actions must take place on the basis of these drivers in order to convert. All these partial conversions then contribute to the total conversion from visitor to buyer. If you, as a web shop, can identify these partial conversions, you can also measure them and take action.

Targeted interest becomes specific choice

Interested visitors to your webshop need to make a mental switch. We bend their goal-oriented interest to helping them make a specific choice. To do this, the visitor needs information that answers questions like: How does this product work? Is this product good? Is the price attractive? How does this offer compare to others? The more answers your visitors find on your website, the higher the conversion to a choice.

Information and navigation as drivers

Information as a driving force

Once the visitor is ready to make a choice(s) a crucial moment arises in his need for timely information. Providing advice and product information on an easily navigable website will facilitate the choice. Therefore, to improve the partial conversion from looking to choosing, we must provide effective information above all else.

The analysis of the return on investment of your information services is mainly through other avenues than bounce and conversion rates as discussed in the previous articles. Now, analysis of click paths and searches come into play. After all, you want to know if a visitor actually puts the product in the shopping cart after reading product information.

At the same time, analyzing search queries also provides a lot of information. It gives a very good picture of what questions viewers still have unanswered. Or at least as bad: questions to which the answers are available, but which visitors cannot find. Such analyses often reveal navigation problems or technical problems.

Navigation as a driving force

Of course you can try to answer all questions on your website, but there is a serious danger in that. Product pages that are so full of text can actually cause the visitor to experience it as a nuisance and therefore drop out. You chase the visitor away from your page because you overload them with too much information.

Offering information then goes hand in hand with user friendliness and clear navigation. An important maxim is to make information as accessible as possible through a single mouse click. Provide a limited number of choices where visitors can choose either price information, comparison options, product specifications or other important facts via one click.

Bounce rate and conversion as indicators

If you want to measure the conversion from looking to choosing then several performance indicators are interesting such as bounce rate, but also the ratio between the number of visitors to the website and those visitors who place a product in their shopping cart.

Bounce rate per page, per channel and per landing page

Another important method of measuring conversion to product selection is the bounce rate. That is the number of visits with only one page view divided by the total number of visits. This performance indicator plays an important role in every phase of the E-commerce Performance model.

In the look phase within the E-commerce Performance Model, we mainly check for bounce-rate on pages where the visitor can make a choice decision. If the bounce-rate is high, this tells us that the visitor makes the decision not to take a specific product or product category at a glance.

As the web shop obtains a better position in Google's search results, the importance of measuring the bounce rate at page level increases. More and more visitors will enter the webshop on deeper pages. When the visitor enters directly on a product page, he or she has not taken note of the total assortment in a more general context. Therefore, it is important to provide direct links to all kinds of other information on product pages that can provide answers to the questions raised.

For landing pages (think of discount promotions or an advertising offer), another dynamic applies. Here it pays to offer few choices on the specific landing page. If you only offer three options on such a page and leave out the complete navigation of the rest of the page, you actually push the visitor to the product of his interest. On such a landing page there should only be a link to the home page. Mainly so as not to completely lose the visitor who still changes his mind and does not choose the product. Here the rule is 'the fewer choices, the more likely the visitor is to take the path you have in mind'.

Visitors adding product to the shopping cart

Visitors adding product to the shopping cart is a conversion rate that we plot against the total number of visits. Add-to-cart as a conversion rate is thus the percentage of visitors to an online store who add a product to the shopping cart. This performance indicator is closely related to the bounce rate, the number of visitors who leave a website after having seen only one page and the percentage of visitors who checkout a shopping cart. Add-to-cart ratio tells something about product selections and pricing, about marketing and the checkout process.

Product selection and pricing

A web shop that suffers from low add-to-cart rates may have problems with site navigation, the search function on the website, product selection, product presentation or pricing. You will have to analyze this further to find out which of these problems are having the most negative impact on your webshop

Marketing

By looking at add-to-cart rates in the context of marketing, you can find out which campaigns are most effective. Then it's not just about attracting new visitors, but also for visitors who actually convert. This way you can look at individual campaigns.

Email campaigns that have an add-to-cart rate of 10 percent or higher send emails that perform well. These are the kinds of campaigns you want to repeat. On the other hand, you see that if you are running a search engine marketing campaign with an add-to-cart rate that is lower than 7 percent that you need to take another look at what you can improve.

Checkout process

The difference between your website's add-to-cart rate and cart completion rate is a very good indicator of how much improvement you can make. Even a small improvement in the difference between your add-to-cart rate and cart completion rate has the potential to make a lot of money.

Think about your returning customers, who are more likely to add a product to their shopping cart. But what if the conversion rate of this group is lower than average? This could be an indication that you are not making it easy enough for your returning visitors. As a new customer you expect to have to fill in certain personal information, but for returning customers it can be a source of irritation that they are not recognized and have to go through this process again. You'll have to analyze your specific situation, but this is an example of what you might learn from a difference between add-to-cart and cart completion.

Summary

In this article, we discussed the third stage of a customer journey of the E-commerce Performance Model for:

• Interpreting the performance indicators "bounce rate" and "conversion";
• What insights the conversion rate add-to-cart gives us;
• How to redirect targeted visitor interest to a specific interest;
• recognizing drivers within dropout moments for better navigation and information delivery.

The next phase of the customer journey in the E-commerce Performance Model is the "Buy" phase. In this phase, we go deeper into how to help the visitor engage and complete the purchase.

Below is an overview of articles by phase in the E-commerce Performance Model:

• From passerby to customer : coming
• From passer-by to customer : watch
• From passer-by to customer : choosing
• From passer-by to customer : buy
• From passer-by to customer : coming back

Also interested in the critical performance indicators for web shops and where you use them within your customer journey? Perhaps you already use performance indicators, but do they measure the right things for your webshop? Feel free to contact us to discuss this.