All over the world, we can see that e-commerce has started growing crazily. Especially in past 2 – 3 years online shopping has reported prolific growth in comparison with last 5-7 years. It’s because customers have started becoming friendlier with technology and vendors started offering e-commerce at very ease i.e. free shipping, discounted rates, cash on delivery and easy return policies etc. These makes online shopping even easier for traditional buyers.
With e-comerce vendors growing many folds, the competition forces them to use as many marketing channels available to promote their e-stores. Vendors are spending a lot on various online marketing channels to promote their business and using analytics to track the sources of conversions.
The main problem is that most analytics tools show the only last source of conversion. For instance, customer visited the website through facebook advertising campaign first and then again visited again through organic search and then made a purchase. Here, analytics tool will show the source of conversion as organic search but that credit actual should have been attributed to facebook advertising campaign. This problem is solved by Google Analytics’ new feature Multi Channel Funnels which was launched some months ago.
In this blog post, I’m going to present case study for multi channel analysis of one of our e-commerce client. It shows how multi channel funnels helped them analyze their online marketing channels better. Now they know actually where they should actually spend more or less.
Case Study – using Multi Channel Funnels to optimize different marketing channels
We have observed that client’s website is getting decent amount of traffic through organic source but the e-commerce conversion rate is very low. Hence, we focused on organic segment to optimize with the help of multi channel funnels.
We started analyzing organic visits data of that client and found some interesting opportunities to optimize organic segment with the help of multi channel funnels.
Our key insights during the analysis:
Insight 1 – Users coming through organic search did not convert in their first visit:
In case of our client, Organic search is playing major role it didn’t convert well, for instance in some of cases organic search was laid in between somewhere with other traffic sources i.e. direct, paid etc.
You can see in above image that organic search was first source of visit, and also in between other channels before visitor converted but it was last source of visit in very few cases. Based on that we can derive the conclusion that visitors did not get more information on how to proceed with the website in terms of purchasing product that’s why they again visited through other sources.
Actions taken –
from the above insight, we found out that there is a scope to improve usability of home page and communicating products and services in easier way.
What we did –
- Included “About us” in main menu
- How to articles
- FAQs
- Customer Reviews
Insight 2 – Customers who come through organic search took longer to convert
We have also observed that through organic search, conversion ratio at the same day was high, but some customers took much longer to convert.
In the above image, you can see that 48% visitors converted on the same day and other 16% visitors took 12+ days to convert.
Actions taken –
Based on this insight client has taken actions to shorten the time taken to purchase for those 16% visitors.
- Live chat program / 24X7 Call Center to answer queries of visitors on real time basis.
- Sending mailers for giving tips, reminding about their unfinished purchases and keep in touch with customers over the time.
- Asking for surveys, feedback, question or problems faced by customer while making purchase decisions by visitors easily.
Multi Channel Funnels provide valuable learning on fine-tuning of purchase process of website based on the feedback provided by visitors. Ultimately, it leads in increase of customer satisfaction ratio that will help in boosting conversion rate in future.
You can also carry out same kind of analysis for your website. If you need any help in analyzing your Multi channel funnels, then you can reach out us here.
