What Is A Website Sales Funnel?
To the dismay and surprise of some website business owners, attracting a lot of visitors to your site doesn’t necessarily result in a high number of sales. If your website isn’t designed to convert well, they’ll simply bounce away without making any meaningful interaction. Developing a sales funnel is essentially about being cognisant of the series of steps that will encourage your website visitors to engage in a way that draws them to your end goal. Setting up a sales funnel allows you to measure the effectiveness of each step in the process.
Defining Your Website’s Sales Funnel
Website sales funnels widely differ and are dependent on what your end goal is. The ideal range is between two and four steps – the more steps that are required, the more likely they are to drop off along the way. In order to construct your funnel, consider the following points:
- Who are you trying to sell to? You need to understand your ideal target customer in order to be able to create steps that are attractive to them. Consider their age, their budget and primarily what they are looking for.
- How do you engage them from the first visit? A sales funnel needs to begin right from when they first enter your website – how can you immediately get them interested? This might be a special offer, benefits of your product or service, or a call to action button such as “Get Started” or “Book Now.”
- How can you convince them you’re the best choice? Once you’ve received the customer’s preliminary attention, you need to “seal the deal” by offering solid persuasion, such as reiterating the special deal, providing testimonials or examples, or a map.
- Is your goal for them clear? In the end, this is all leading towards your goal. Make sure your contact form, booking form or purchasing page is visible and easy to use.
Sales funnels should be simple and straightforward. Some examples that might apply to your website are:
Homepage → Sales Page → Order Form
Landing Page → Contact Page
Product Page → Add To Shopping Cart → Add Shipping Info → Confirm Order
Setting Up Funnels In Analytics
Once you’ve decided which pages are the steps of your sales funnel that you want visitors to participate in, you can set up goals to measure their effectiveness in Google Analytics.
1. Set up a new customer conversion goal. This is done by going to Admin > View > Goals and clicking “New Goal”. This should be a goal that adds financial value to your business (such as enquiry phonecalls).
2. Set up your funnel. Under “Goal Details” flick the Funnel switch to On. You can set up to 20 funnel pages, and can specify whether the first (i.e. landing page) in the funnel is the required starting point or not. Once you’re done, click “Create Goal”.
3. View the results. Analytics provides a detailed analysis of each step in the funnel, including whether people have dropped off and where they clicked away to. You can view this under Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualisation.
A website sales funnel is a way of tracking the path of visitors through your website, and of optimizing this so that you carefully nurture your hard-earned traffic into valuable conversions and sales. View the The Google Analytics Conversion Funnel Survival Guide for more tips.
To the dismay and surprise of some website business owners, attracting a lot of visitors to your site doesn’t necessarily result in a high number of sales. If your website isn’t designed to convert well, they’ll simply bounce away without making any meaningful interaction. Developing a sales funnel is essentially about being cognisant of the series of steps that will encourage your website visitors to engage in a way that draws them to your end goal. Setting up a sales funnel allows you to measure the effectiveness of each step in the process.
