The Session Purchase Funnel report helps you to understand aggregate conversion effectiveness across all website visits. Use it to identify site conversion effectiveness, based on session behaviors, and to allocate investment to maximize visit conversion.
In addition to the default Session Purchase Funnel report, the report is available as the Session Application Funnel report for the Financial Services vertical.
The Session Application Funnel Report offers Financial Services users the ability to find ways to attract qualified visitors and optimize their website experience.
Looking at site session activity can often uncover room for improvement in various areas of the website. By doing a simple analysis of your website traffic at the session level, you can get a high-level snapshot of the health of your website.
Examples: data analysis
Session Purchase Funnel (default)
You can compare visitor groups to see how the conversion of New Visitors, Repeat Visitors, or Previous Buyers differs for those with previous interaction on a website.
You can use the Session Purchase Funnel report to develop a strategy for improving conversion rates:
- If Visitor Sessions conversion is low
- Investigate marketing effectiveness to assess opportunities for optimizing channel spending, creative, or audience targeting.
- If Browser Sessions conversion is low
- This result might indicate a problem of site stickiness or the ability for your visitors to locate products on your site. Investigate site navigation and product placement concerning how your visitors search for products.
- If Shopping/Prospect Sessions conversion is low
- Investigate product page creative and pricing to understand why customers are not adding products to their shopping cart.
- If Buying/Customer Sessions conversion is low
- Investigate process abandonment for applications, registrations, checkout, or bookings to identify where customers are experiencing issues and departing the website.
- TruePath and Clickstream
- Reporting can be set up as a next step to further investigate pathing progression and attrition for each of the conversion points.
Session Application Funnel (Financial Services)
You can use the Session Application Funnel report to monitor branding initiatives and investigate trends.
- Analyze marketing exposure online
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The ratio of Direct Load Sessions (sessions where users directly type your site's URL into their browsers) to all sessions is evidence of the success of branding initiatives. If you see this ratio increase over time, you are successfully promoting your brands and traffic is now coming directly to your site. If this ratio is decreasing or the number of Direct Load Sessions itself is decreasing, you should use the Marketing reports to further analyze how you can increase your brand recognition.
If you have recently increased your marketing exposure online, you should expect Referral and Search Referral Sessions to increase. However, in the absence of increasing marketing spend, these numbers should remain constant or should decrease as brand recognition increases. If these session metrics are not trending as predicted, you might want to investigate this behavior using the Marketing reports.
- Investigate trends in average session time
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Trends in the Average Session Time metrics can be indicative of the ease of use of the site. The goal with these metrics is to increase the Average New Session Time, meaning that new visitors are spending longer on the site and hopefully doing more in that time, and to decrease the Average Repeat Session Time, meaning that repeat visitors are finding their desired content faster. To improve these trends, use the TopLine Metrics and Page Categories reports to discover where time is spent on the website.
The Page Views/Session metric is also useful to trend over time. An increasing trend means that sessions are browsing deeper into your website. If this number is decreasing or you want to improve this ratio's growth rate you should conduct further analysis using the Page Categories and Clickstream reports to determine where and why sessions are departing.
Use cases
Session Purchase Funnel
Your goal is to analyze website conversion effectiveness, based on session behaviors, to allocate investment to maximize visit conversion. You are also investigating ways to improve the customer experience and increase conversion on your company website. To drive changes, you must support your recommendations with empirical data.
You analyze the Session Purchase Funnel report for last month for your website and compare the conversion points to Digital Analytics Benchmark reporting. The following is the output data from the Session Purchase Funnel and Benchmark reports.
| Conversion Point | % of Total Visitor Sessions | Sub-vertical Benchmark Conversion Points (All Sessions) | % of Total New Visitor Sessions | % of Total Previous Visitor Sessions | % of Total Previous Buyer Sessions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Sessions | 100.00% | 100.00% | 100.00% | 100.00% | 100.00% |
| Browsing Sessions | 55.96% | 48.44% | 42.21% | 55.44% | 51.56% |
| Shopping/Prospect Sessions | 5.54% | 7.02% | 4.87% | 13.89% | 16.79% |
| Buying/Customer Sessions | 3.14% | 3.12% | 2.60% | 3.37% | 4.59% |
Shopping/Prospect session conversion is low when compared to the Benchmark. Your web team considers evaluating product descriptions and images to persuade more visitors to add products to their market basket. Also, your web team decides to investigate competitor pricing to determine whether they are being undercut. This information helps the team to determine whether discounting is appropriate. Finally, your team decides to ensure that key links are above the fold on product pages.
Session Application Funnel (Financial Services)
The following use case shows how data from the Session Application Funnel (Financial Services) report to increase conversions on a website.
You are responsible for the user experience for the Home page of your company website. One of your goals is to analyze and improve customer experience when a visitor arrives at the website. The goal of the Home page is to effectively encourage browsing deeper into the website and to intuitively guide visitors to begin the actual application process. Your goal is to identify opportunities and recommend changes to drive incremental revenue and increase browser conversion for the Home page.
You review data from the Session Application Funnel report to identify high-level statistics for new and repeat visitor sessions. Then, you gather the following Home page performance data using the LIVEview Click Overlay.
| Home page metrics | January | February |
|---|---|---|
| Average Time on Page | 1:27 | 1:24 |
| Bounce Rate | 42% | 30% |
| Entry Rate | 78% | 78% |
| Conversion Rate | 9% | 13% |
The following two links showed the highest click-through rate for the Home page as reported in the LIVEview Click Overlay. These two links also had the highest conversion rate (Applications/Session).
| January | February | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home page Link | CTR | Applications/Session | CTR | Applications/Session |
| Get Rates Button | 8.30% | 14% | 7.10% | 15% |
| Account Sign In Link | 6.90% | 3.5% | 7.50% | 3.20% |
You work with the user experience and marketing teams to determine the best way to highlight links on the Home page that have a high conversion rate. Your web team conducts an A/B test on the Home page to test creative, key links, and button located on the Home page and the top navigation. Your team uses the Session Applications Funnel and LIVEview reports to measure pre-test and post-test performance. Based on the test results, your team then optimizes the Home page to increase conversion.
Key performance indicators for the Session Purchase Funnel report
By focusing on key performance indicators in the Session Purchase Funnel report, you can evaluate conversion effectiveness across your site.
The Session Purchase Funnel Report populates data for the following conversion points:
- Total Sessions (Visit)
- The number of sessions that reached your website.
- Browsing Sessions (View Product)
- The number of sessions that viewed a product page, added an item to their market basket or cart or completed a purchase.
- Shopping/Prospect Sessions (Add to Cart)
- The number of sessions that added products to their market basket or cart or completed a purchase.
- Buying/Customer Sessions (Buy)
- The number of sessions that completed a purchase.
To analyze data in the Session Purchase Funnel report, focus on the following key performance indicators (KPIs), which are based on the conversion points:
- % of Total Visitor Sessions
- % of Browsing Sessions
- % of Shopping/Prospect Sessions
- % of Buyer/Customer Sessions
Also, when you analyze data, you can compare different visitor groups against the Session Purchase Funnel KPIs to see how new sessions differ from previous sessions on the website. You can compare the following three segment types:
- All Visitor Sessions
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The total number of sessions for every visitor during the selected time period.
- New Visitor Sessions
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The number of first sessions for a visitor during the selected time period.
- Previous Visitor Sessions
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The number of all sessions that are not new visitor sessions during the selected time period.
Session Purchase Funnel reports are the same session-based reports. The same session-based reports do not look across sessions.
For example:
- A visitor comes to your website on Monday, visits, browses a product, adds the product to the cart, and then ends the session.
- On Friday, the visitor returns to your website, visits, browses the same product, adds the product to the cart, and then purchases.
The Session Purchase Funnel report for last week shows the following session counts:
- 2 sessions for the Visit KPI
- 2 sessions for the View Product KPI
- 2 sessions for the Add to Cart KPI
- 1 session for the Buy KPI
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