The Customer Journey
The focus of the new analytics is the complete mapping of every customer journey that takes place in your shop. The analysable core of the Customer Journey, i.e. the path from the front page of your shop to leaving the page, ideally after the purchase is completed, is the Click Through Rate (CTR). Essentially, it represents the proportion of customers who have clicked on an article or advertising material and is displayed in the analytic tool as follows:
A certain amount of loss at each step of this process is completely normal in most cases, even unavoidable, but outliers can provide important clues for improvement. Your goal is to keep the exit rate, i.e. the percentage of customers who leave your shop before making a purchase, as low as possible.
Your shop's stock is also relevant for the interpretation of the values. A shop for branded clothing will generally have a CTR between 0% and 100% at all steps, whereas a shop for mechanics, where you can buy nuts and bolts individually, could have a shopping basket click rate of well over 100%. In such cases it is often appropriate to look at the individual user session.
In the following you will find some explanations of the most important KPIs displayed in the Analytics Tool and initial interpretation approaches for them.
Search
Clicks per search should generally remain relatively constant across all products, especially for shops with a specialised range of products. However, if, for example, a search term has a high number of searches, but only a low percentage of clicks, you can check the following potential exit reasons, for example
- Product is not offered
- Product is out of stock
- Product was not found
Point one leaves you only one option for action, but point two could be improved, for example, by devaluating out-of-stock articles more strongly in the search results. Point three might be an indication of an error in the search logic of your shop, e.g. by which accessories for an article are weighted over the actual product and displace it from the top results.
Shopping Cart
If a much sought-after term has an acceptable CTR, but an unusually large number of users finish their shopping without adding the item to their shopping cart, you should first check the most common sources of error in this case as well.
- Product is out of stock
- product exists in different sizes/colours/etc. - most popular is out of stock
- Product has special conditions
- Product details / pictures are not sufficiently available
The first two points are similar to the search step - perhaps the delivery status or time is only displayed on the product page or can only be filtered by size there. Here it is also important to know the customer base: If your customers are looking for fan shirts of a metal band and these are marked as generally available in the search view, the high exit rate could be due to the fact that only sizes XS and S are available. FACT-Finder's Personalisation module, suitable ranking rules for variants, and frequent delta updates of product data can help here.
Special delivery conditions apply to products such as Amazon Plus items, i.e. an item that appears attractive at first glance can only be purchased together with another, or is only available from a certain total purchase value. Here you can maximise customer goodwill and minimise exit rates by clearly marking such special conditions on the search results page.
Last but not least, the product detail page must of course also convince the visitor. Can they find the exact specific product data for technical products? Are clothing articles equipped with sufficient, high-resolution product images from all angles on models? Are there any product preview videos for DIY products that give the customer an insight into the construction?
Purchase
The last and most important step in the customer journey. Dropouts in this phase are primarily due to three reasons:
- Payment methods
- Shipping
- Lengthy registration process
If, for example, the only payment options you offer are credit card and advance payment by bank transfer, you will particularly discourage younger customers (credit card) and generally all urgent buyers (advance payment). If the customers are jumping off in rows despite PayPal and invoice as an option, the problem could also be with your shipping conditions. If you still charge 8€ for shipping even with a three-figure value of goods, this can quickly drive your customers into the arms of the competition, even if you offer the best prices.
Last but not least, a lack of user-friendliness could also drive the potential buyer away. The user has worked out the perfect trouser + shoe combination in 90 minutes, but between him and the dopamine boost of the purchase made there is now a multi-page questionnaire with a manually entered invoice address, delivery address and various decisions, e.g. newsletter, data processing, etc.
As with payment options, the speed of the process is becoming increasingly important today. Sometimes it is better to pay the 3% surcharge for PayPal Express Checkout, just to avoid having to type in your own address twice - without umlauts, of course.
Conclusion
Of course, all this was only an extremely superficial view of the world of data-driven online shops. The KPIs collected in the shop can directly help you to fine-tune functions of your site, such as suggest and campaigns, and to track the results of your tuning in real time.