Accurately measuring the success of your customer’s journey on your website is vital to increasing conversions and having the best outcome for your business. When it comes to website analytics, the Funnels feature is the best place to start measuring each touch point in the customer journey. From here you’ll find out where you lose your visitors so you can make changes to your website and convert more in the future.
The funnels feature lets you measure the steps (actions, events and pages) your users go through to reach the desired outcomes you want them to achieve. This gives you valuable insights into the desired journey for your customers.
When creating a funnel with the funnels feature, you anticipate the customer journey that you want to measure, for example:
Step 1 – Visitor lands on your homepage and sees the promotion you’re offering.
Step 2 – They click the call-to-action (CTA) button which leads them to information on the product
Step 3 – They add the product to their cart
Step 4 – They fill in their personal information and credit card details
Step 5 – They click the “pay now” button
From here you can see exactly how many visitors you lose between each step. Then you can implement new techniques to decrease these drop-offs and evaluate the success of your changes over time.
But what about the non-conventional routes to conversion?
That’s right, visitors can end up in all different directions on your website. It’s important to use other features in Matomo to discover these popular pathways your visitors may be taking before the point of conversion.
Here are 4 Matomo features for discovering important alternative funnels on your website:
The transitions feature lets you visualise mini funnels on selected pages. You can see how visitors landed on a specific page, and then where they moved on to from this specific page.
First you need to identify the page(s) that sells your product or service the most.
Whether it’s your homepage, a product page or an information page on your services. The transitions feature will then show you the before and after pathways visitors are already taking to get from page to page
The transitions feature is located under Behaviour – Pages. Find the important page you would like to analyse and click on the Transitions icon.
In the example above, you’ll see 18% of visitors who entered from internal pages came from the homepage, which you may have already suspected as the first step in your conversion funnel.
However, the exact same % of visitors are also entering through a blog post article called /best-of-the-best/
In this case, it highlights the importance of creating funnels with popular blog posts as the first step in the funnel. Your visitors may have found this post through social media, a search engine etc. Whatever the case, your blog posts could be your biggest influencer for conversions on your website.
The overlay feature lets you see exactly where visitors are clicking on your landing pages which moves them either in the right or wrong direction in the conversion funnel.
If you see a high percentage of clicks to a page that’s off the beaten track from your desired conversion funnel, use the Funnels feature to follow this pathway and analyse how they get back to the pathway you initially intended them to take.
The best thing about the page overlay feature is the visualisation showing the results on the landing page itself. This gives you an idea of where they may be getting distracted by the wrong content.
You can locate the page overlay feature beside the transitions feature, shown in the screenshot below.
The page overlay feature also gives you a summary of the pageviews, clicks, bounce rates, exit rates and average time spent on page, so you can measure the overall success of each page in the display menu.
If you’re looking to see many of the most popular pathways your visitors are taking all at once, then Users Flow is a powerful feature which shows this visualisation.
Note: For Matomo On-Premise users, Users Flow is a premium feature. More information here.
The thicker the blue line between interactions means the more popular the pathway is.
Here you can see how visitors are navigating their way through your website before converting, this presenting clear steps in the conversion funnel that require monitoring and improving on to ensure your efforts are going into the right areas on your website.
Another important feature to use which is integrated within the funnels feature, is row evolution which shows you important changes in your user’s behaviour over time.
Having row evolution integrated within the funnels feature gives you a big advantage as it lets you measure the specific metrics and landing pages within your conversion funnel.
You’ll be able to see the increases and decreases in entries and exits to your landing page, as well as increases and decreases in the number of visitors who proceed to the next step in the funnel, and the conversion rate %.
You’ll also be able to add annotations so you can note all the changes you make to your landing pages over time and quickly identify how these changes impacted your conversion funnels.
>>Learn more about Row Evolution
Continually create more and more funnels!
Measuring the success of the desired pathway you want your customers to take is crucial to ensure you are presenting the best possible user experience for your visitors.
However, creating funnels for the less desired pathways is equally important. This way you’ll discover popular journeys your visitors are taking within your website you weren’t previously aware of, and can monitor them to make sure they still work in the future. You’ll be able to fix pain points easier and find faster ways to get visitors back on the right track to converting.
