Conversion Funnels [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

As Avinash Kaushik pointed out in a recent blog post, while all web­sites are dif­fer­ent, most have one thing in com­mon — a con­ver­sion process.  Even if your web­site doesn’t sell any­thing, there are still often process steps that you want your cus­tomers to go through.  It may be a reg­is­tra­tion process, the open­ing of an account or sim­ply a lead gen­er­a­tion process.  Regard­less of its pur­pose, the end goal is to see how suc­cess­ful your web­site is at get­ting vis­i­tors to com­plete a series of pre-defined mile­stone steps (usu­ally defined as Site­Cat­a­lyst Suc­cess Events).  Many clients do this through nor­mal page-by-page pathing analy­sis, but this only gives you part of the pic­ture.  In this post I will pro­vide “the rest of the story” (RIP Paul Harvey!).

Why Pathing Is Not Enough
When you first start out using Site­Cat­a­lyst, it seems like there is noth­ing you can’t accom­plish with page-by-page pathing.  For exam­ple, let’s say you have a con­ver­sion process that includes the fol­low­ing steps:

1. Get Cus­tomer Information
2. Get Ship­ping Information
3. Get Billing Information
4. Show Order Thank You Page

Since each of these pages will have a unique page name, there is no rea­son why you can’t cre­ate a pathing fall-out report that includes these pages so you can see cus­tomer fall-out.  It might look some­thing like this:

You can mon­i­tor this over time and even add mul­ti­ple ver­sions of this report to a Site­Cat­a­lyst Dash­board so you can com­pare dif­fer­ent time peri­ods or coun­tries.  How­ever, pathing reports have one major down­side, they include all site traf­fic.  What if you wanted to see the same fall-out report above for vis­i­tors com­ing from Google Cam­paigns or only for first time vis­i­tors?  To do this, you have a few options:

1. Use Omni­ture Dis­cover and apply the seg­ment you desire to the fall-out report
2. Cre­ate ASI slots for the seg­ments you desire and cre­ate the fall-out report in the ASI slots
3. Cre­ate a DataWare­house report and cal­cu­late the fall-out using a spreadsheet
4. Merge together seg­ment and page data into a new Traf­fic Vari­able (sProp) and enable pathing (advanced)

While all of these will work, there is a much eas­ier way — uti­lize the Site­Cat­a­lyst Con­ver­sion Fun­nel report.

Con­ver­sion Fun­nel
So what is the Con­ver­sion Fun­nel?  You would be amazed how many long-time Site­Cat­a­lyst users have never found or used this report.  At its core, the Con­ver­sion Fun­nel report is a spe­cial report that allows you to add Suc­cess Events to a fun­nel and see high-level fall-out num­bers between each met­ric.  While it sounds like a pathing fall-out report, it is actu­ally very dif­fer­ent.  In a pathing report, in order for a path view to the sec­ond page in the flow to be counted, the page view has to take place after the first page the fall-out report and within the same visit.  Con­versely, a Con­ver­sion Fun­nel report does not care about vis­its and only reports raw met­rics (Suc­cess Events) that take place dur­ing the spec­i­fied report­ing time period and cal­cu­lates the dif­fer­ence between every two met­rics.  For exam­ple, in the fol­low­ing Con­ver­sion Fun­nel report, if the time frame is Feb­ru­ary 2009, then the report would be indi­cat­ing that, in Feb­ru­ary, the Cus­tomer Infor­ma­tion suc­cess event took place 328,998 times, the Billing Infor­ma­tion suc­cess event took place 126,559 times and there were 57,800 Orders (I kept the num­bers sim­i­lar to the pathing num­bers above for sim­plic­ity, but in real­ity these might not match exactly).  This doesn’t mean that the same vis­i­tors per­formed each of these Suc­cess Events in the same ses­sion, it just shows how many of these Suc­cess Events took place in the spec­i­fied time frame.

To get to a Con­ver­sion Fun­nel report, you sim­ply nav­i­gate to a set of met­rics, Pur­chase Met­rics (shown below), Shop­ping Cart Met­rics or Cus­tom Met­rics and click on the item that con­tains Con­ver­sion Funnel:

The truth is that it doesn’t really mat­ter which “Con­ver­sion Fun­nel” link you click on since you can add/remove met­rics as you wish, but the report will default to dif­fer­ent suc­cess event met­rics depend­ing upon which ver­sion you select.

Now that we are begin­ning to under­stand what Con­ver­sion Fun­nels are, why should we care?  The magic of Con­ver­sion Fun­nels lies in the abil­ity to fil­ter them by Con­ver­sion Vari­ables (eVars).  As men­tioned above, it can be a bit chal­leng­ing to view fall-out reports by Cam­paign, Visit Num­ber, City, Mar­ket­ing Chan­nel, etc… but Con­ver­sion Fun­nels come with a built-in abil­ity to fil­ter by any avail­able eVar:

Fil­ter­ing is sim­ply a way for you to tell Site­Cat­a­lyst to show you a dif­fer­ent view of the Con­ver­sion Fun­nel that only shows met­ric counts where the selected eVar con­tained the spec­i­fied value at the time the suc­cess event was set.  The best part of this fea­ture is that you can apply a fil­ter and the book­mark the report or add it to a dash­board and com­pare Con­ver­sion Fun­nels side-by-side.  For exam­ple, you can fil­ter a Con­ver­sion Fun­nel by Mar­ket­ing Chan­nel and see a Paid Search Con­ver­sion Fun­nel next to a Dis­play Ad Con­ver­sion Fun­nel in a dash­board.  Finally, Con­ver­sion Fun­nel reports also pro­vide a slew of con­ver­sion met­rics at the bot­tom of the report which can also be added to dashboards.

Impor­tant Things To Know About Con­ver­sion Fun­nels
The fol­low­ing are some impor­tant things to know about Con­ver­sion Funnels:

1. You can use the Com­pare to Site fea­ture to see two dif­fer­ent report suite Con­ver­sion Fun­nels side-by-side or two dif­fer­ent date ranges side-by-side
2. Cal­cu­lated Met­rics can­not be added to Con­ver­sion Fun­nel reports
3. Con­ver­sion Vari­able (eVar) fil­ter­ing will only apply if the Con­ver­sion Vari­able (eVar) is set before or at the same time as the suc­cess events in the funnel

Have a ques­tion about any­thing related to Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst?  Is there some­thing on your web­site that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best prac­tices you want to share?  If so, please leave a com­ment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@​omniture.​com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so every­one can learn! (Don’t worry — I won’t use your name or com­pany name!).  If you are on Twit­ter, you can fol­low me at http://​twit​ter​.com/​O​m​n​i​_​man.

Learn more about Omni­ture Consulting

Learn more about Omni­ture University