Top or Bottom of Funnel – Which Is the Best Place to Start?
It’s overwhelming. Before you can begin to optimize a web site, the first question you need to answer is, “Where do I start?”
Bottom of Funnel Considerations
Some will argue to focus on the bottom of the funnel, where your visitors sign up for your services or on the shopping cart where they make a purchase. They argue that every visitor who purchases will use this feature, regardless of which page they landed. However, if your site doesn’t convince visitors to take action, they’ll never even reach the bottom of the funnel.
Start at Top of Funnel for Maximum Influence
You want to start optimizing the pages that visitors see most often. You should have Google Analytics or another analytics solution installed on your web site. If you don’t, that should be your first priority. Without analytics, you don’t even know what is and isn’t working on your site. You’re flying blind without analytics.
Run an analytics report showing your most visited pages. Typically, your home page and landing pages get the most traffic. Start with the highest traffic (most influential) page.
Finding Your First Test Idea
When analyzing any page for optimization opportunities, I start by answering the following questions:
- Who is my target audience? – Who is most likely to benefit from my product or service?
- Why are they here? – Are they shopping for a product, or just looking for information?
- How can the page help visitors solve their problem? – Should they click on a link to buy, read to the end of the page, or sign up for information?
- What gets in the way of them taking the action that will best solve their problem?
Focus on this last item. It’s the key.
Knocking Down the Barriers
Several things might prevent a visitor from taking a specific action, including the following:
- No Clear Path – They may not know what to do.
- No Desire – They don’t know what’s in it for them to take action. The cost seems higher than the benefit.
- No Urgency – They have no reason to act.
- No Trust – They lack confidence that you can solve their problem at a perceived price that’s lower than the perceived benefit.
The easiest of these problems to test is number 1 – No Clear Path. Look at your page with your visitor’s eyes. Can they easily locate the CTA (call to action) that you want them to click? Do they know how to interact with your form or ecommerce system?
In short, is it intuitively obvious what you want them to do? If not, start there. Build a test around changing page elements such as layout, size of the CTA button, or other ways in which you can call attention to the thing you want the visitor to click.
Beyond the Basics of Testing
I have made a career out of conversion rate optimization through testing. For 9 years, I was a Senior Consultant at Adobe supporting their Adobe Target testing and personalization system. I have run hundreds of tests for dozens of Fortune 500 clients over the years, such as Microsoft, FedEx, Disney, E*Trade, and many others. And here’s a little secret. Big companies make the same kinds of mistakes than smaller ones do, and if you understand your audience well, you have about as good of a chance of coming up with a great test idea as companies with a dedicated optimization team.
Just keep testing, and you’ll understand your visitors better and you’ll find what works for you.
-Steve Myers