I was listening to Flint McGlaughlin from MECLabs talk about Measuring What Matters, yesterday, and he said something I found profoundly interesting. And obvious, only I'd not thought to say it this way:
"Metrics are indicators of thought processes."
Which means that every click and movement by a website visitor around your site is predicated by their intent, as well as their anticipation of what their choices will give them.
The gist of this means that by determining and analyzing this sequence of thoughts, we can gain better understanding of our market. In fact, when we think about conversion, we're thinking about what WE want. Your customers don't think in terms of "Ah, yes, let me convert right here on this link."
If you're looking at your website analytics and you notice bounce rates going up, stop right now and take a step back. Bounce rates are an expression of dissatisfaction. Your web page didn't deliver whatever the person was expecting, so they didn't stick around.
What you need to do to improve your website visitor engagement is to map their thought processes at each click. To determine what they're expecting, track origination and referral links. By knowing where they come from you can better deliver on expectations set before the click.
An additional thing to consider is how you collect visitor information. Whenever you make an offer, you're delivering something of value to the person in exchange for their information and attention. Asking for information incrementally is one way to assess the level of engagement and trust you've established, once they know what to expect from you.
For example, if they've provided their name and email to download a white paper in the past, and return to visit a webinar registration page with a form that asks for more information, but leave without filling out the form and registering, what do you learn?
Either the content about the webinar didn't meet their expectations or they decided they don't trust you enough to give you more of their information. The value exchange doesn't balance from their perspective. If this behavior is exhibited by a number of visitors, then you'd better re-evaluate.
These are some of the reasons why I think click path or navigational history analysis is really interesting. By monitoring how your website visitors move around your website and interact with your resources, you can determine how well you are executing on meeting their expectations. It's not just did they visit the pages, but did they spend enough time on them to get the value they were looking for?
What you want to look for is where they exit. At what point do you lose them? Is there a pattern of this page leaking repeatedly? Look at what brought them to that page where you lost them. Are you promising something you're not delivering?
Once you get beyond the idea that it's all about volume and start focusing on quality and engagement, you'll find that metrics can tell you a lot of things that get you closer to your website visitor and potential buyer's thought processes—and their interests.
