Depressing Metric - Abandonment Rate

How likely are you to take a bus which stops at every corner of the road and takes a very long time to reach the destination ?

Very unlikely right.... !!! Same is the visitors mentality when it comes to buying your product. 

Is the trip to buy your product a very lengthy and boring one? If yes, then you surely are facing a very high abandonment rate. 

So what's abandonment rate and what's so depressing about it?

Abandonment rate - It is the percentage of customers who abandon the application form or shopping cart or any process of buying a product. If your application form is a lengthy and tedious process, a lot of visitors who start applying get irritated half way through and abandon the process thus decreasing your sales.

The depressing part about abandonment rate is that all the efforts you have put in to attract visitors to your website and to make them start filling the application form just went waste, because you couldn't keep the application process simple. 

Abandonment Rate = 1 - (Applications Submitted/Application Starts)

For an normal website, the abandonment rate should be nothing more than 40%. Keep an eye on this metric, because all the money you are spending on getting visitors to your website might just go waste if your application abandonment rate is high.



How to keep a this depressing metric an all time low?

There is no single solution to this question or probably any question when it comes to web analytics. The answer will vary for every domain and every segment of customer being targeted. The best solution is to Test, Test and Test. Something which works for an online clothing store might not work for a loans website and some strategy which might work in India might not work in USA. So let the customers themselves tell you what they like and what they don't. 

Here are some idea which have been proven successful many a times and could be tested on your website if relevant. 

• Break the application process into groups. Follow an order in which the application form requests for data and group them into segments. For example Personal Information - Name, phone number address etc, Professional Information - company name, address and role etc., Financial Information - Annual salary, other income etc. Follow a logical Sequence.

• Have a lead generation form before the application form - Lead generation form is the small form which requests for the visitors name, phone  number and email ID. Post submitting this lead generation form you can direct the visitor to the main application form. This is a very nice practice if you do no want to lose any visitor who starts the application form. Imagine if the visitor abandons the form at second or third step you still have the contact information and you  can do your sales on call or through email.

• Help visitor fill the form - Make the form easier by providing drop down, suggestion etc. In case the visitor starts filling the form, quits it in between and comes back, auto-populate the information they had previously filled in. It makes the visitor feel soo happy and he/she will surely finish remaining part of the form this time before they leave. 

• Fall-out report - Adobe Site Catalyst provides this wonderful report called the fall-out report which reports the number of unique visitors/visits at every step of the application process and also the fall-out at every step. Identify the pain point page and try to make it as simple as possible for the visitor. Lets get into this report in detail

This is the funnel report created from a 5 step application process excluding the lead generation form. You have paid omniture a lot, so they have made the report fancy and very easy to read and understand.  

(Serialization was set up for this site Catalyst Suite thus any to and for movement in this 5 step process would be considered as only 1 visit.)

Step 1 : ~29M visits filled in your lead generation form page for a particular product in a month and landed on the application step 1. 

That's nice to see, but keep trying hard to increase this number as much a possible. Remember, not every one who starts the application process completes. And in case the application is related to Finance then your risk team might reject their application.

Step 2 : Around 11% people quit the application process just after looking at the first page of the application form. Not a very bad number, but if there is a scope for improvement then every percent is worth trying. 

Step 3 : With 89% moving ahead from Step 1 to Step 2, step 2 made 72% of those 89% quit the application process. 

Bad !! Very Bad!!! We just lost around 75% of people who started the application form !!! This page needs serious improvement. 

Step 4 : OMG !!! We lost another 15% of the people who started application process !! Another bad page. 

Step 5 : Name says its a Thankyou page but we only have 10% of all the people who started the application process coming here. 

Such a depressing report. We could have got around ~29M customers but we got mere ~3M !!! This means the application process needs a serious revamp.  How? 

Answer : Test, Test and Test. Make changes to the pages and see the results. 

If you see improvement then be happy because you found the solution to acquiring more customers online, and in case you see that it gets even worse, then atleast you know what's not working for you and you can test something new. 

To test you don't need rocket science. Be human and think like a customer and test. Here are a few simple recommendations and tests. 

• Remove unnecessary pages - People get bored with lengthy application process, we already know that. If there are multiple pages which visitors have to complete, then at every step you will see atleast a little fallout, fact of life. So lets reduce the number of steps, reducing the probability of fallout.  Identify if there are any unnecessary or small pages, if possible remove them from the application process or club them into another page.

• Motivate the applicant - You know your process is lengthy and boring and you can do nothing about it, so atleast keep the applicant motivated by showing him/her the application completion percentage. If a person is getting frustrated filling the application form pages and doesn't even know how many more questions he/she has to answer, then you are literally testing his patience. Showing the completion percentage atleast makes him feel good that he is close to completion (in case he is, atleast you will not lose a lot of visitors when they are close to completion)

• Don't get too Greedy - Yes, you might have spent a lot to get visitors to your website and start your application process, but that doesn't mean you have to squeeze as much as you can from the visitor as soon as he starts filling the application form. Do not try to cross sell any other product before the visitor completes his application process. If the cross sell product is an add-on product, you can keep it at the end of the application process. But first let the visitor establish atleast one relationship with your company.

• Do not lead visitor out of the application process - You might want the visitor to opt for the offers you provide or probably some club membership etc. as a part of the package during the application process and in such instances you might provide a link giving details for the same. Keep external links as less as possible as they distract the customers from application filling process and if you feel its necessary then see to it that the link opens in a new tab so that the visitor doesn't stop filling the application form. 

• Back and Forth Navigation options - Keep free back and forth navigation option in the application form. Visitors might want to verify or change what they have filled in the previous pages of the application form. You don't want them to abandon the form every time and start anew every time they make a mistake. Right!!

• Forms Abandonment - Now you know the pages which are making people fall off the application process, but if you don't understand what is making them leave the application form page then Adobe Site Catalyst provides another awesome functionality called the forms abandonment. This report tells you from which point on the form did the visitor quit the form. Choose the top questions where the visitor drops off and see if you can simplify it or better remove it from the application process.

These are some tips on reducing the abandonment rate of the application process. You can think of some tips yourselves when you start filling the application form all by yourselves.

Good and Bad Websites

There is no single mantra to achieve success in this world, in any domain or any aspect of life. One has to listen to their heart, their brain and learn from their experiences. 

Try Try Try till you succeed. This is the only mantra to achieve anything on this earth and that anything includes optimizing your website and bringing more revenue from your website.

So, let's start from the smallest things making our foundation strong. Here are few basic steps to be followed to make you website openable, readable and revisitable.

• Keep your website slim and fit - No one wants to wait more than 5 seconds for the page to load. Survey says that at 8th second your visitor is already frustrated and at 10th second you have lost him. Keep the website as lite as possible and especially the home page. You cannot change the internet speed of your visitor or you cannot expect a mobile user to download a 4MB webpage, so better change the content and keep it lighter. Next time you decide to put a 5MB sized hippo's picture on your home page, remember you are literally trampling your website under the same hippo.

• De-clutter your page -  A website with 100's of links all over the page will only make your visitor pull his hair. Imagine a well organized website, with all products grouped under their respective sections, a left Navbar to show the flow of current section, a top Nav bar listing all the sections on the website and small images of few key products or a particular section being promoted weekly or bi-weekly on the home page. Isn't that Wow!! Neat & Clean ! 

These are the India and US websites of citibank. Which one do you think is less cluttered? I am sure the traffic on that Thankyou card is much much more than the Indian Oil  Platinum card.

 

• Remove Flash - Flash is gone Baby, for Heaven's sake forget Flash !!! You don't want a high net worth individual opening your website on a high-end device to see a message "Flash not supported" instead of your fancy Image. 

 

Here is the home page of india-forums.com and you can see the message right in your face "India Forums Homepage Banner requires Adobe Flash". Home page banners are the first thing that catch visitor's attention, this is where you get the most conversions from and alas! all we get to see is a sad error message. 

• Do not deviate from the context - If i put up a dancing monkey on right side of this web analytics blog, then there will be no difference left between that dancing monkey and me !! Never ever forget the answer to "why does this website exist?" Here is a fantastic example of a good promotion and a bad promotion on the same website. 

• Bad Part - Our very own favorite irctc wesbite, popularly know for its snail pace speed has come up with a huge list of an "on-hover" shopping list drop-down and a shopping banner on homepage. Wow. Imagine the frustration of a person unable to login or book a ticket online due to its poor speed, is shown the list of items available to shop whenever he moves his cursor !!!  The important section of  alerts and updates has been given half the space of what the shopping banner gets. Ask yourselves, is irctc a shopping website of a train ticket booking website? 

• Good Part - The credit doesn't go to irctc, but to tata-docomo, who has encashed the opportunity of promoting his product keeping in mind the snail pace speed of irctc website.  I love the way tata-docomo marketing team promoted its product of high speed internet on irctc. 

 

• Keep your 3rd party servers far away - If your website is connecting to a 3rd party server for some campaign or for analytics or any other purpose, try to keep that part of the code towards the end. You don't want your webpage not to load completely just because one of the 3rd party servers you are trying to connect to is not responding.

• Add Name and meta-tags to your webpage - You don't always want to pay and get visitors to your website. Name and tag your pages properly and get free organic traffic to your website. Read What is organic data? to understand more about organic traffic.

• Tag all your pages - Its up to you, either spend a lot of money and buy a hi-fi web analytics tool like omniture or webtrends or just register for google analytics free of cost. But in both cases main point to remember is to tag every page on your website. Unless you tag your pages, you will not record the traffic, you will not understand what's happening on your website and you will never be able to satisfy your visitor/customer.

 

• Test & Test & Test - Are you happy with all the traffic that comes to your website or do you want more? If you want more then keep testing. Make changes to the website as frequently as possible but one at a time. Track every change and see which change brought you visitors & conversions more than the one currently put up on your website. Put the winner on, but don't be happy with the few extra customers which are coming, test again with something new. You never know the next test recipe might bring even more visitors than the last winner. Be Greedy and Be Ready to Experiment. Test and Target of Adobe helps in A/B and Multivariate testing. In some of the coming posts we will see what these two testing methods are.

•  Conduct Survey - An easier way to understand your visitor is to conduct a survey, ask your visitor his likes and dislikes. A survey generally tends to bring out the negative points about the website more than the positive. Well, that's the irony of life, whenever we have a bad experience we tend to write a compliant for sure, but when we like something we hardly care to compliment ! But its fine. Testing based on a survey result can lead to great results.

•  Be the customer - An analyst, who puts himself in the shoes of a customer or a prospect can bring revolutionary changes to the business. Though this is easier said than done, as the analyst has little authority to make changes, and its not easy for big bosses of the company to "be the customer". Well, an analyst should never give up hope and never stop raising their points. You never know which day your boss might actually give you a chance to change the world.

In the Name of Security, did Google act Selfish?

Google, one of the biggest and most popular search engines silently made a change to its search and announced that its search has become 100% secure. Google says, previously only the signed in user search was secure (which was ~10% of the organic traffic), but now secure search has been made global.

Before I tell the pros and cons of secure search we will 1^st see what does google mean by secure search? 

Here is the google search engine. 

Previously when you typed google.com it would lead you to http://www.google.co.in, but now it takes you to https://www.google.co.in. You see that "https"? ‘s’ stands for secure. 

This ‘s’ means, whatever you type in your google search bar is very secure and will not be passed on to anyone else i.e. no one will come to know what you searched for. Read What is organic data? to see how your search keywords are passed on to websites you visit. 

So, feeling happy and safe? Well, enjoy your privacy, but there are bigger implications to this. 

Remember the Search Engine Optimizers, who make your web experience better every day, they are currently on the verge of losing their jobs. 

 

Let’s see what difference secure search made to the world of web analytics.

So, here I am searching for “flipkart android phones” on google.com, and I choose to visit one of the organic (non paid) search results.  

Let’s see on firebug what data was passed on to flipkart. Aswe already, know utmctr variable (of google analytics) captures the search keyword which visitors typed in search engine. 

OMG, where is the search term that I typed? Instead there is this silly “not%20provided” as the value for utmctr variable. My keyword is lost!!! It will not go to flipkart.com web logs and will not get reported in the google analytics reports generated by flipkart!!! BooHoo...!!!

I have repeated the same steps on bing.com, which does not have secure search.

See, the utmctr captures keywords “flipkart%20android%20phones” which I typed on bing.com. Now this will be collected in  weblogs and will be available in reports of flipkart.com. Yay!!!

Coming to the Paid (non-organic) search.  Keywords for Paid search still flow in to the reports i.e. if you type some keywords and click on the paid ad’s (the top results which are colored ), keyword data gets captured and is also made available to the website you visit. But do you know, whenever you click on paid ad’s the company whose website you visit has to pay google? And this is no petty amount; there is a lot of bidding which happens for the paid ad’s. 

So do you think Google acted Selfish? Probably yes if look from the perspective of an analyst, but No when look from the eyes of a user who is tensed about his security. 

People around the world use various search engines. Few months back, yahoo got the highest number of unique visitors in US than google.com. Still, google.com is one of the major search engines which contributes a lot of organic traffic. Since the launch of 100% secure search by google, traffic with the keyword “not provided” has increased to ~45% for any website. Google’s its own analytics tool also does not get access to the organic search keywords.  

Now with this “Not Provided” data, search engine optimizers are in a fix. Keyword information from other search engines still flows into the reports and can be used to take decision, but having a better quality data always helps in taking better decisions. Big People say, that its time analysts should move on from the search keyword analysis and find others ways of increasing their web traffic and conversions. Probably, losing keyword data is a boon in disguise and Google is paving way for analysts to come up with some good innovations in the world of web analytics.

What is Organic Data?

How frequently do you open up a search engine and type some random words looking for something? Daily?? Hourly?? Or even more frequent than that? 

Have you ever thought that, in a full-fledged web-based company there would probably be a 15-20 member team who would call themselves Search Engine Optimizers and are paid a hefty amount to just keep analyzing what you typed in your search engine?? If you have no clue about it, you can probably again “search” for SEO job openings and see the demand all by yourselves.

Well, the terms you enter in the search bar of google, yahoo, bing, seznam, baidu etc. are called search keywords. When you enter the term “web analytics” into google.com the search engine starts crawling through the websites, which are already indexed, to look for the two keywords “web analytics” that you typed in.

A well-organized website, with all meta-tags (html or JavaScript) in place, listing all possible keywords that depict the website and match the keyword searched by you, will have a better chance of being found easily by the search engines thus being listed in the top results. 
 
From a company perspective, a good website with an intelligent web analytics team would have around 30% to 40% of its traffic coming from Organic channel and the SEO’s strive to increase that percentage as much as possible. 

Remember, we are here talking about Organic traffic. You can also pay to get into the top results, but that would be Paid search and not Organic. Read who visits your website to understand the difference between paid and Organic.

Organic traffic is the best set of visitors you can ever get because,

• Visitors land on your page because they were looking for something which you can provide and
• Organic is free. You need not spend money to get people to your website, ofcourse you have pay salary to your SEO’s

More the organic traffic less is the money you need to spend on external partners for ads and campaigns.

So what do the search engine optimizers do? 

They firstly organize the website in such a manner that it becomes easy for crawlers to find the keywords being searched by people. This includes

• Adding meta-tags and labels into the website which lists the products or contents that are available on the website.
• Making every page of the website reachable to the crawlers. Remember crawlers are codes which search for keywords, they do not execute any scripts (javascript or html) present on the website
• They analyze the keywords that direct people to the website and webpage and make the user experience better. Imagine you search for a women’s clutch in google and clicking on the top search result page takes you to shoe section of the website how would you react?

Well, the above list is very long and these three are just the basic part of what SEO's do. Though SEO is a part of web analytics, it is an ocean in itself. 

Now, Let’s quickly see how these web based companies get the keyword information that you searched on your laptop or desktop or any device. Remember nothing is hidden on internet. Someone or the other knows what you are doing online.

Here is a picture of me typing the words “Flipkart Android Phones” on bing.com. Choosing bing.com on purpose as google has made some recent changes which I’ll cover in my next post. 

 

I’ll choose one of the organic results, remember the top results which are colored are paid search results.

So, this is the page on flipkart.com which opens when I click on the above highlighted search result. 

Look at the google analytics tags below in the firebug. Read Have you ever explored your cookies? to understand the firebug tool and the cookies.

The cookie collects all the information and passes on to the web analytics team of the website that you are visiting. 

In google analytics(which flipkart uses), utmctr is the variable which holds the search keyword data which you typed on your search engine, which resulted in some search results and you clicked one of those results to land on this particular page. 

Now this search keyword data is two steps back i.e. you didn’t type anything on flipkart.com. You had typed on bing.com so how come flipkart came to know those keywords? Here comes the referrer into picture.

Referrer is any website from where the visitor came to your website. The cookie stores this information too.

Read Who visits your website? on the different channel’s that drive traffic to your website. Other than the direct channel every channel will have a website link present in the referrer variable. The search engines will have their own link like bing.com and google.com etc., social media will have facebook.com or twitter.com etc and external affiliates will have the link of their own. Direct channel will have that variable set to ‘Typed/Bookmarked’ as there will be no other website which led you this this website. 

Now along with just the URL, bing.com or any website sends across some more information about the page from where you went to the website you landed on. Especially when it comes to the search engines, the main information they have is the words you literally search for. This is real gold for the company whose website you visit. This is the input data for the SEO’s.

Along with utmctr there are a lot of other key-value pairs (variables with their values are called key value pairs), but we will see them sometime later. For now, just know that the words you search on the search engines value a lot to someone.