Anatomy Of A Conversion

Whenever a potential customer converts into a lead, I always look to see, how did they find out about us? (Well okay. Sometimes I am better than others. Especially when a lot of customers convert and then I just want to see trends.)

But it was a weekend. Quiet. So when one of the conversions came through, I went to my Google Analytics to learn who he was and how he found out about us. I started by looking at Marketing> visitor segment performance> geo location and saw that the conversion was in the US (go figure.) I kept drilling down by hitting the plus sign until I learned that the conversion came from Delray Beach. (Notice the 100% under the G1, Goal 1, next to Delray Beach.)

Then I segmented by Source to see where he came from, and it was a link from my blog! So I went into my blogalytics and did the same analysis, looking for the Delray Beach visitor, but this time, when I segmented by referring source, it was a search from Google.

Above you see how I do the segmentation, and below you see the result:

So I did the same keystrokes, looking at all the visitors from Florida, but this time, segmented the Delray Beach visitor by keyword. He had typed in, “website conversion funnel.”

Hmm, I thought, I didn’t even know that LunaMetrics ranked for that term. So I tried it in Google, and after I signed out, I saw that my blog (but not my site) came up on page one.

At this point, I felt like I was on a mission. I went over to ClickTale, which I installed on my blog but almost never use. (For those of you not familiar with it — it tapes the user session.) I rarely use it because I don’t learn much from it and it takes a lot of time. Mostly, I watch people scroll and it gets very tiresome, very quickly. But this particular one was fascinating, not because he did so much (he mostly scrolled), but I was able to see where he scrolled quickly (not interested) and where he took his time.

So now, I know that the customer is from Delray Beach, Florida, he is concerned with website conversion funnels, he read my six most recent posts on my blog as well as my post on “What Do Web analysts Do All Day Long?,” he completely skipped all the fun parts in my “Dear Sexy Web Analyst” post and went right to the Google Analytics. What he read was interesting enough to check out my site, and what he saw on my site was interesting enough to submit a form. And then I met him on the phone today. Sort of like Phil Kemelor’s 2×2 matrix — here was someone that I know both online and offline.

Robbin Steif