The Visitor Purchase Funnel report allows you to identify site conversion effectiveness, based on unique visitor behavior. 

In addition to the default Visitor Purchase Funnel report, the report is available as the Visitor Application Funnel report for the Financial Services vertical.

The Visitor Application Funnel (Financial Services) report offers you the ability to find ways to attract qualified visitors and optimize their website experience. By being able to get a quick view of how differing visitor groups are interacting with applications on a website, business owners can identify suggestions for various types of visitor-focused marketing. Use this report to easily compare drop-offs for each conversion point for each type of visitor. The ultimate goal is to identify opportunities and recommend changes to drive incremental revenue and increase conversion by optimizing the appeal of your website for new or repeat visitors and applicants.

Examples: data analysis

Visitor Purchase Funnel

This allows you to gain insight into buying and navigation habits, compare visitor types, trend key conversion points. You can compare Visitor Groups to see how the conversion of New Visitors, Repeat Visitors, or Previous Buyers differs from those with previous interaction on a website.

You can use the Visitor Purchase Funnel report to develop a strategy for improving conversion rates:

If Visitors' conversion is low

Investigate marketing effectiveness to assess opportunities for optimizing channel spend, creative, or audience targeting.

If Browsers conversion is low

Investigate home page real estate effectiveness, navigational categories, and on-site search effectiveness to determine what challenges customers are having in finding a product.

If Shopper/Prospects conversion is low

Investigate product page creative and pricing to understand why customers are not adding products to their market basket.

If Buyer/Customers conversion is low

Investigate process abandonment for applications, registrations, checkout, or bookings to identify where customers are experiencing issues and departing the site.

If Repeat Visitors conversion is low

Analyze repeat visitor preferences to understand how to promote items to bring visitors back to your site.

If Repeat Customers conversion is low

Identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities to ensure that customers return to do business with you again.

TruePath and Clickstream

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.

Visitor Application Funnel (Financial Services)

You can analyze the Visitor Application Funnel (Financial Services) report to optimize each point of your process in order to increase retention rates.

• VISITOR: Maximize site traffic
  • Optimize marketing programs (banners, affiliates (sites/email), search engine placements, landing pages)
  • Increase targeted communication efforts
• BROWSER: Encourage Browsing Beyond the Home page
  • Maximize site tools and site navigation
  • Offer simple and consistent navigation from page to page
  • Optimize on-site search
  • Reduce "No Results"
  • Page avoids the need for vertical and horizontal scrolling
• INITIATED APPLICATION: Provide visitors with all necessary information to encourage adding to the application
  • Anticipate potential questions from applicants
  • Place less critical information in the application process below the fold
• APPLICANTS: Smooth the Buying Process
  • Examine the current application process for improvements by using Clickstream and TruePath reporting
  • Identify key areas of attrition in the important applications by using the Forms report
  • Create Forward and Backward Looking Clickstreams Reports at each step
  • Focus on cross-sell opportunities
• 2X APPLICANTS: Encourage visitors to return to the website to purchase again
  • Develop a form of retention marketing
  • Focus on the post-purchase experience
  • Send segmented emails

• Investigate the differences between new and repeat visitors in marketing reports. Use a segment for new and repeat visitors to analyze what avenues are bringing those visitors to your site.
• Investigate the differences between new and repeat visitors on specific paths in the site

Consider your top five pages and use Clickstream reports to understand where the differences are between new and repeat visitors. Also, analyze Average Time on Page & Pages/Sessions metrics to understand website stickiness.

Use cases

Visitor Purchase Funnel

One of your goals is to analyze website conversion effectiveness based on unique visitor behaviors in order to allocate investment so that you can maximize visitor conversion and customer loyalty. You are also investigating ways to improve the customer experience and increase conversion. To drive changes, you must support your recommendations with empirical data.

• First, obtain data for the three most recent time periods for analysis from the Visitor Purchase Funnel report. Time periods should be sufficiently long to be representative of visitor behavior (for example, weekly or monthly).
• Identify visitor conversion ratios for each time period.
• Calculate the average conversion ratio over the time period.
• Set targets for conversion effectiveness based on historical performance.
• Monitor conversion points on an ongoing basis to identify problem areas and assess an opportunity for improvement.

The following is the output data from this reporting exercise. The figures in red indicate performance that falls below the target low conversion point.

Your analysis for the Visitor Purchase Funnel output data and the next steps for making changes on your company website are as follows.

Repeat Visitor conversion is trending below the target. Your web development team should investigate the browsing preferences of Repeat Visitors to determine where content and product that interests this group can be more prominently featured on key pages. The web development team should also consider an email program that targets bringing visitors back to the site through seasonal promotions. Also, Shopper/Prospect conversion is slightly below the target. Your webs team should investigate product page creative and product pricing, assure that key links are above the fold, and confirm that product details and images are clear and accurate to understand why customers are not adding products to their marketing basket. Your web development team should conduct an A/B test for product pages on the website to figure out which product page tools or features are driving visitors to convert and which ones are not.

Visitor Application Funnel (Financial Services)

Select and compile the data necessary to complete this reporting use case by using the Visitor Application Funnel Report.

You are responsible for the user experience for your company website. One of your goals is to ensure a quality experience when a visitor arrives on the website. You want to understand the behavior of high-value visitors to improve website design. To drive changes, you must support your recommendations with empirical data.

You decide you need to analyze a number of reports to identify opportunities to improve your site design, including the Visitor Application Funnel Report. You follow these steps to complete your analysis.

• Identify the high-level statistics by new and repeat visitors in the Visitor Application Funnel.
• Investigate traffic from specific marketing sources for each segment. For example, direct load new visitor sessions and all-new visitor sessions.

• Identify the most popular applications for new and repeat visitors by overlaying a segment onto the Page Categories report. Next, compare TruePath pathing performance and the attrition rate for each step in the application process to uncover areas for improvement.
• Create a summary with observations and next steps.

After completing your reporting exercise, you reach several conclusions.

There were far more new visitors to the website than repeat visitors during your reporting time period, but repeat visitors are more likely to complete an application on the website. New visitors are more likely to enter the website by using Natural Search. Repeat Visitors are more likely to enter the website by using Direct Load and Emails.

You plan to capitalize on Repeat Visitors by sending targeted emails to those visitors with offers and products specific to their interests based on previous actions on the website. You plan to investigate which specific natural search terms are driving new visitors and new applicants to your website to further invest and optimize this marketing channel. Finally, by using TruePath, you discover that the login page has the highest attrition rate in the application process and will work to optimize this page to improve forward progression for the path.

Key performance indicators for the Visitor Purchase Funnel report

By focusing on key performance indicators in the Visitor Purchase Funnel report, you can evaluate conversion effectiveness across your site.

The Visitor Purchase Funnel Report populates data for five conversion points.

Visitor Conversion (Visit)

The number of unique visitors that reached your site.

Browser Conversion (View Product)

Every visitor that views a product detail page, adds a product to the shopping cart or places an order.

Shopper/Prospect Conversion (Add to Cart)

Every visitor that adds a product to the shopping cart or places an order.

Buyer/Customer Conversion (Buy)

Every visitor that purchases a product.

X2 Buyer/Loyalty Conversion (Buy 2+ Times)

Every visitor that places two or more orders during the selected period.

To analyze data in the Visitor Purchase Funnel report, focus on the following key performance indicators (KPIs), which are based on the conversion points:

• % of Visitors
• % of Browsers
• % of Shoppers/Prospects
• % of Buyers/Customers
• % of 2X Buyers/Customers

Also, when you analyze data, you can compare different visitor groups against the Visitor Purchase Funnel KPIs to see how new sessions differ from previous sessions on the website. You can compare the following three segment types:

All Unique Visitors

The total number of unique visitors to the site during the selected period.

New Unique Visitors

The number of visitors who had not visited the site before the selected period.

Previous Unique Visitors

The number of visitors who had previously visited the site before the selected period. Previous Unique Visitors are a subset of All Unique Visitors.

Visitor Purchase Funnel reports are the same session-based reports. The same session-based reports do not look across sessions; however, because Visitor Purchase Funnel reports are based on unique visitor metrics, Visitor Purchase Funnel reports are deduplicated at the unique visitor level. Unique visitors are a distinct count of cookie IDs.

For example:

• 1 unique visitor for the Visit KPI
• 1 unique visitor for the View Product KPI
• 1 unique visitor for the Add to Cart KPI
• 1 unique visitor for the Buy KPI