Conversion Funnels vs. Conversion Pathways

Many web analytics tools such as Google Analytics allow you to measure the effectiveness of your online conversion funnels, in an effort to optimise your website’s conversion rates. But you may question how effective this really is.

The concept of a conversion funnel has been adapted from the traditional offline sales model of moving a consumer along a series of steps from lead, to prospect, to sales proposal, and finally, to close.

In the online world, conversion funnels adopt the same linear approach, and include steps such as home page, category page, product page, shopping cart, and finally, check-out. Many use a number of conversion funnels for measuring conversion rate optimisation.

Basing your conversion rate optimisation on linear conversion funnels is a good starting point, but it does tend to assume that people want to participate in the sales funnel the way they’re expected to. Therefore, if this is your only means of optimising your sales process, you could be selling yourself short.

Whilst you may be lucky to move some people through these desired funnels, in reality, web visitors rarely navigate a website in a linear fashion. Instead, people take quite random and often unpredictable paths as they forage for the specific information they seek. The hard truth is that site visitors are in complete control of their interactions, not you. So how can you possibly control what happens outside the predictable conversion funnel?

The answer is in ‘conversion pathways’. These are sets of web pages, often sitting outside the expected sales funnel, that contain specific persuasive elements to help encourage and entice people to take the actions that lead them to their goals. The key to providing the right conversion pathways is in thorough knowledge of your online customers.

To begin, it’s important to determine the primary customer profiles your site is catering for, and for each of these profiles, work out the likely ‘scent trails’ that they could follow in order to reach their goals.

To do this, intimate understanding of your customers and their objectives is essential to avoid making costly assumptions. Once your customer profiles are clearly understood, the next step is to describe a number of realistic purchaser scenarios and map the key pages on your site that could be involved in the customer’s decision journey.

For each page on your site, decide:

• Which customer profile is this page for?

• What stage in the scenario does this page help with?

• What scent trails could this customer follow from here?

• What is the best way to expose the scent?

• What is the most persuasive way to make the next step obvious?

This may all seem quite daunting, and to be frank, it’s actually far easier to ignore. Getting to know who your online customer really is and understanding how to move them along a scent trail, and ultimately, to take desired actions, is essential. It achieves a more robust conversion rate optimisation programme that will yield superior results for your business.