A Conversion Rate Optimization report by Econsultancy revealed that 78% of businesses are unhappy with website conversion rates.
Website optimization is a cornerstone for any business with a digital presence. Your website is not just a point of contact, it’s an influential marketing funnel. An optimized website will effectively list on search engines, leverage social networks, sell more, gain customer understanding, and maintain customer convenience.
Seventy-nine percent of online shoppers don’t return to poorly performing websites, which is why an optimized website is essential for your bottom line.
Piwik PRO Analytics
This article will walk you through six steps to optimize your website’s performance using Piwik PRO Analytics. You can use this template, include the inferences derived from your dataset, and maximize the potential of Piwik PRO Analytics.
The penultimate goal here is to isolate the key site traffic drivers, and the pages driving traffic. In other words, to identify the most popular points of entry to your website in order to focus optimization efforts.
The ultimate goal is to identify the existing bottlenecks of these key traffic drivers and optimize the website’s overall conversion rate.
Six Steps to Conversion Rate Optimization using Piwik PRO
Step 1: Build an Acquisition-Behavior-Outcome Framework
The Acquisition-Behavior-Outcome Framework (ABO framework) explains how to acquire traffic, and understand behavior and business outcomes generated. Comparing ABO frameworks from the last quarter with the present is a quantitative method of comparing your present KPIs and goals with those of the past.
Now, you use the ABO framework to isolate all the specific changes observed between the current quarter and the last.
Step 2: Identify change
Use Piwik PRO Analytics to create channel reports to isolate causes of anomalies. These reports compare the contribution of different channels with previous quarters.
Channel reports show channels that visitors use to reach your website. There are four channel types used:
- Direct entry: A visitor enters your website by typing the URL into a browser. This can be attributed to brand awareness.
- Websites: Alerts you to users that land on your site from another.
- Campaigns: Shows visitors that enter your site by clicking on a link from a running campaign. The Piwik PRO URL Builder collects these campaigns.
- Search engines: Indicates when a visitor enters your website by clicking on a search engine result link.
Step 3: Employ Page Reports to Collect User Behavior
Now that you know the overall traffic is attributed to certain channels, it’s time to analyze user behavior with Piwik PRO Analytics Page Reports.
The page report lists all visited pages by URL. You can view several metrics including page views, unique page views, entries, page bounce rate, and exit rate. In this case, we can sort the data with respect to a channel for a particular page by clicking the page URL.
Step 4: Understanding Your Audience with Audience Reports
Piwik PRO Analytics provides multiple, comprehensive reports to gain insights about your audience. You can start by viewing the Audience Overview Report.
The Audience Overview report helps you understand:
- Sessions: The number of visitor sessions.
- Visitors: The number of unique visitors.
- Pageviews: The number of times a page was visited.
- Events per session: The average number of events in a session.
- Average session time: The average duration of a session, measured from the first to last event during a visit.
- Percent of returning visitors: The percentage of people who came back.
- Conversions: The number of goal completions.
- Conversion rate: The percentage of sessions during which visitors completed a goal. Goal conversion rate = Sessions with a completed goal / Sessions * 100%
With Piwik PRO Analytics, you can also learn the location of visitors through location reports, and the devices and operating systems with devices and software reports.
Step 5: Create Hypotheses and Validate them
A hypothesis is a question whose answer explains the logic behind a particular user trait. These question include:
- Is organic traffic bringing in less qualified users to the site?
- Are there any technical issues prohibiting users from a desired action?
- Is content providing the answers users are looking for?
Piwik PRO Analytics can create a list of hypotheses and validate them. During validation, both qualitative and quantitative analyses arrive at the recommendations.
Step 6: A/B Testing
The recommendations derived from validation paves the way for A/B testing. All insights derived from Piwik PRO Analytics reports can build hypotheses but, none can provide a foolproof plan. It is advised to conduct A/B testing and implement all hypotheses.
The best performing tests pair Piwik PRO Analytics insights with the capabilities of Piwik PRO Tag Manager and Optimizely.
A/B testing divides overall traffic into different variations of the same website. Create weekly or monthly reports to gauge the effectiveness of every test. Finally, implement the test that provides the highest conversions on the final website build.
This detailed guide should give you the know-how needed to use Piwik PRO Analytics to optimize your website’s conversion rate.