Or far less temptingly: “why conversion funnels are your friends”
Your time is limited. Business stakes couldn’t be higher. Marketing channels keep multiplying. And there is so much data “to help you” that sometimes it seems easier to do nothing at all. 
But what if I told you that with some shrewd use of web measurement and site optimisation, you could achieve the following:
- Plug revenue leaks
- Stop a haemorrhage of online customers
- Delight your bookers
- Make more money
- Achieve analytics nirvana
I kid you not – using analytics to optimise your online booking process can deliver you all this! (Well, maybe not the last one).
Deep focus on the booking process (or other major conversion points) on your site, combined with systematic testing is amongst the most powerful analytics you can do. It is a place where you are almost certain to see return on investment from an analysts time invested here – provided you take action based on what you find.
So if this is really true why isn’t everyone doing it? Well, many companies are – and they’re doing it very well. Expedia, Hertz, Travelocity to name just a few. And if your competitors are obsessing about this and you’re not, they’re at a huge advantage. But many companies are not – and if you’re one of them all is not lost. This post tackles some basic principles – and if you’re looking for a way of embedding web analytics and optimisation into your business, then I hope this is especially relevant for you.
And fear not – if you are a one man marketing, management, customer-service, analytics, social media, web-guru machine that has to do everything yourself – fear not, this is still for you. Perhaps even more so, because this is one place where if you carefully focus even a small amount of effort, you will see impact on the bottom line.
Let’s get over the barriers first
This will only work if you focus your efforts on the stuff that matters. Conversion, revenue, customer satisfaction and specific online visitor behaviours.
So page views, visits and God-forbid (may I never hear this word ever again) HITS? No! Or to channel my inner Amy Winehouse – No! No! NO!!
Don’t fixate on these – they are just units of counting. They are metrics, ingredients if you like – they are not the answer in itself. There’s not necessarily even a positive linear relationship with these basic metrics. More page views may simply mean more people are lost and having to reluctantly look at more content before they can resolve their issue.
Using your time effectively and impacting the bottom line means measuring what matters – the things that make you money, save you money – or improve customer satisfaction and thereby achieve both. In my presentation at the Eye For Travel Technology Conference at World Travel Market I put it in these terms:
It’s clear, I think, that counting page views, time on site or unique visitors alone – in isolation from real business goals – cannot possibly deliver you gains, savings or love. But conversion/booking process optimisation can. So time to introduce the conversion funnel…
How to look at your conversion process
The conversion funnel looks at the flow of visitors through the various steps of your booking process. 
At its simplest, as shown in the graph, you are using the basic shape of the funnel to identify potential problem areas, so you can dive in to the data and explore further.
For the data to be meaningful, you need to focus on narrow, linear processes like payment processes and form submissions – the good news is there probably only a small handful of these on your site.
You can do this manually in Excel, but with varing degrees of set-up all the major web analytics packages automatically present your conversion funnel information in a clear visual way. In Google Analytics, for example, you have to first specify your conversion goals and set up the associated steps in your funnel process.
But once you’ve done that set up, you have the raw ingredients you need to start booking process optimisation.
In my view, here is where you find the quickest wins in booking and conversion process analysis:
I work through this process, in conjunction with the conversion funnel data, in order to first find the complete disasters (like failing transactions due to technical errors). I then aim to find out where for some reason or another people are simply not behaving like we would want them to. And finally I am identifying specific pages or parts of pages that have to be improved and that must be the focus of any testing and optimising efforts. Remember that web analytics can only tell what is going on – it can’t tell you why. You need voice of the customer data for that.
So, note number two – “help!” I would be happy to wager you a fiver that the people in your organisation that speak to customers on the phone, be they call centre staff or receptionists, probably have a better grasp of what is wrong with your website than your IT staff do. They hear it every day. Optimisation starts when the dots between end users of the site, customer facing staff and IT are joined up – and communication flows between them.
It is not always so simple, of course, and there comes a time where if you don’t have your own analytics resources, you probably need to buy them in. But there is so much you can achieve to start with by yourself, using analytics data to inform testing and optimisation.
When to stop looking and start acting
Of course, analysis without action is simply idle indulgence. Once your data has given you a theory you have to test it by making changes – and then see if the data shows an improvement. The more systematic your testing, the more confident you can be in your results. There are plenty of tools to help you – we use Google Website Optimzer with our clients.
Measurement and testing have to go hand in hand – otherwise you may find your “improvements” make things worse. Assumptions alone aren’t enough. Both Expedia and Hertz, my co-presenters at the Eye For Travel conference, made similar – really vital – points about booking process optimisation. They both found that it isn’t always about making the process shorter, or in less pages – sometimes, quite counter-intuitively, more steps or longer forms work better for the customer.
Ultimately, using the data web and customer data available to watch, listen, learn then improve your site for the visitor is in my opinion one of the surest ways to improve the bottom line results from your web channel.
I will be presenting on this subject at Canada eConnect in January, so I’d love to hear your triumphs, quick wins or the barriers you face in booking process optimisation so I can tackle them head on at the event!
This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Data, Online customer behaviour, Web analytics and web measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.