In the aims of making your analytics data actionable and not just a bunch of pretty statistics, let’s look at your conversion points, and how effective your funnel is at keeping customers involved in the checkout process. It’s call a funnel because its typical that a lot of people  enter the beginning phases of a conversion point, but you’ll naturally have people leave throughout the process.  Our goal is to reduce the number of people leaving the funnel and turn the shape of your funnel into more of a shot glass (I know only Anvil employees are going to get that joke, but I had to include it. We’ll explain if you really want to know).

Lets start with a case study from a very simple B2B site who had a one page form used for lead generation. Nothing too crazy going on here, except for the fact that they had at least a dozen form fields (not all required) on their contact page. Here is how their conversion rates looked with the long form.

Hmmm, 8% completion rate. Not great. I see a lot of lost leads .

Alright, so lets go back to the site, remove and fields that are not absolutely required and let your sales team acquire that information instead of relying on the web. Now lets see what happens with a form about half the length of the first one.

Well that’s better. Now, I know that our sample size is different as this is only after a week of making the change to the form, but we have nearly doubled our form conversion rate, and seen some of the highest daily goal conversion rates since we launched the site. Not to mention we’ve acquired nearly the same amount of leads in a week than we did in an entire month.

I know this isn’t rocket science and has been repeated a million times, but so many companies have yet to optimize their forms, so I thought you might need another reminder.

For those of you with e-commerce sites and multiple steps in your funnel, things are going to be a little more complicated, but we’ll tackle it anyway. Look for another post coming soon!