For some strange reason a few weeks ago, I decided to go to Ikea and check out a few products. So I entered the store and you know, I’m caught in this labyrinth of flow through the store… they’re controlling how I move through their store in a physical space by putting walls up and beds and showcases and all those different things to control the flow.
Now on the Internet, we call that userflow. We want to try and map a users journey through a website to get the ultimate goal a conversion, an inquiry, a sale ,whatever that might be that you want the user to do. Ikea are doing it really really well they’ve nailed that in that environment. We are always trying to nail it online for you. So how can we do that? First of all we need to look at some stats around what we’re looking at when we are checking out user flow.
And there’s a great tool in Google Analytics believe it or not, that actually maps Behaviour Flow they call it but it’s a good example of user flow. It shows where people are entering and then where they’re dropping out and where they’re going to and looping back through the site so in a business-to-business site, there’s a little map of our site of a little little tiny snapshot, and you really it can be difficult to interpret what is actually going on, unless you have very very defined goals in your site.
So I want X to happen on X and therefore do Y. So but in our case you know for a lot of B2B it’s a nonlinear approach. People are moving around the site, so I try to make the most out of user flow by using calls to action in different pages and actually most pages, to actually just create that ‘hey if you want to do this and you really want to look for us inquire here now.’
One example of a b2b side where you should be seeing the contact page to be right up quite high in your interactions, so if they’re looking at one or two pages services, product there might be, and then finding your contact page in that first or second or third interaction then that’s really good. That’s really cool.
So let’s have a look in a nonlinear environment, in e-commerce obviously it’s a linear envionment, you go to the shopping cart, you want them to go to the product page, add the product to the cart, and purchase. Here’s an example of that, Google Analytics conversions goals flow funnel is here to give you an example a shopping cart one page checkout order completed or online it’s a very controllable step.
And you’d work with your conversion optimizer to really refine and to stop people falling that flow, and another example is in this case let’s go back to this one is a bike tour company they’re looking at the tour catalog, they go to the individual tour description, and they fill in inquiry form.
That’s a very linear user flow, but where do you start when you’re trying to really improve it is to look at analytics and see what pages how they’re entering, where they’re going in those first few interactions, and is it what it intended? It may be not.
So you need to adjust your site looking at the stats on a regular basis and making sure that user flow is in alignment with your products and service, and your overall objectives of these site. If you’d like to know, more come and chat to us the team at KND and now will help you on your user flow journey.
