Are you using these techniques to diagnose issues with your e-tail store?
If you have a physical shop, you are probably accustomed to greeting customers in person. This would make it easy for you to find out what they are looking for — but unfortunately, it’s a more complex situation when you attract prospects through your company’s online arm.
Web analytics tools like Google Analytics could show that many visitors to your website leave it without making a purchase. But why is that the case for your store?
Here are several ways to seek answers to that question…
Capture ‘click maps’ of your webpages
What is a ‘click map’? It is a graphical representation of where people have generally been clicking the most on a given webpage — regardless of whether those clicks were on a link.
So, you will be able to see which parts of the page people seem to wrongly perceive as clickable. Maybe some graphics keep getting clicked due to being mistaken for navigation buttons, or certain people click product photos because they want to enlarge them.
These findings can give clues as to how to make your website more intuitive to use. You can create click maps with mobile-friendly tools like Crazy Egg and Decibel Insight.
Record how visitors spend sessions on your website
Of course, it can be useful for you to know a lot more about these visitors’ behaviour than where they clicked. You can also benefit from knowing, for example, how long they lingered on particular pages of the site and where they moved their mouse cursors.
Clicktale and Hotjar are two examples of tools that can record what happened on the screens of your website’s visitors when they were dropping by — or for that matter, dropping off. Does your website have specific stumbling blocks that are repelling visitors at an especially high rate?
Analyse interactions with your website’s forms
Yes, as we just mentioned, session-recording tools can help you study how people interact with those forms. However, these deserve extra-special attention for one reason above all: those visitors who bailed out on your forms were very close to converting.
Encouragingly, form-analytics software like Zuko (formerly Formisimo) and Inspectlet can tell you what percentage of people who landed on a form tried but failed to submit it. You can also discern whether any form fields tend to be left blank or trigger error messages.
Insert exit surveys into your website’s code
If you are a member of staff at a brick-and-mortar shop and see a shopper there about to exit, you could quickly step in to ask if they are looking for anything in particular. Perhaps surprisingly, you can interject much like this in an online store, too — by using an exit survey.
An exit survey is so-called as it is designed to pop up just as the website’s visitor is leaving. The survey could ask about the visit’s purpose and whether it was fulfilled today — and if not, why not. These surveys can be made with Usabilla and similar tools.
If you need expert assistance with pursuing any of these web diagnosis methods, we invite you to reach out to the Piranha Designs team by phone or email. Indeed, whether you are on the lookout for website design, graphic design, search engine marketing, ecommerce, or system development companies in Gibraltar, the UK, or Spain, our company is one that you can trust.
