Would the real "get to product page" metric please stand up.
I’ve worked with quite a few e-commerce sites over the past few years and in our dashboard of metrics visits reaching a product page has always been there. This is for two reasons:
- In (almost) all cases its possible to add a product to the shopping cart page from the product page
- Because the product page naturally contains the greatest volume of information relating to a product.
So it has always been considered good to get visitors to the product page because shop owners stand a better chance of selling from the product page.
On that basis marketers often have a fairly obvious eureka moment and decide what a good idea it would be to land traffic directly on their product pages. No!
Product pages are just that, they aren’t landing pages. There is a significant difference and it is hard to find a page that will do both.
Because of this strategy it is possible for the “Get to product page” conversion metric to vary from anything between 40-75%. I think there are two problems with this.
Firstly this standard way of viewing this conversion metric doesn’t take into account traffic that was just dumped there by an adword campaign or a banner of affiliate campaign.
Secondly, by including visits that enter on product pages it masks the ability of the site to actually drive traffic through to these pages.
Funnels
Ah, but what about using a funnel to accurately track conversion to product page?
It depends on which analytics tool you use but many now, including Google Analytics, quite correctly (in my view) do not base their funnels on rules that require a visitor to have passed through the previous step in order to be counted I the next step. That means all visits reaching each step are counted – including those that enter directly.
Don’t forget bounce rate
How could anybody forget bounce rate. In this instance bounce rate queers the pitch because not only do these visits enter on a product page but they also disappear again immediately without doing the one thing we want them to. In other words not only did the site play no part in driving these guys to a product page but also they were totally disinterested in what they saw. Definitely not to be included in a performance metric like “get to product page”.
In short then, first know what you want to measure.
- Is it the site’s ability to convert visits to a product page or…
- …just the total number of interested visits that arrive at a product page.
- Or do you really want to know the total figure, warts and all.
If it’s 1 then look at total volume of visits reaching the product page less the total volume of visits that enter on a product page.
If its 2 then look at the total volume of visits that reach a product page less the total volume bounce visits on a product page.
If it’s 3 then send an email, I’d love to hear from you.
