Using Click Trails to Optimize Your Site

In the previous post (Are Customers Beating a Path to Your Store?) we looked at the Referrer field in customer orders as one way to see how shoppers are finding your site. In a certain sense that is like reading the first and last chapter of a book—you get the beginning and end without any of the action in the middle. Fortunately, merchants have a means to determine, for the most part, what happens in the middle. The answer is Click Trails.

Click Trails, available with Merchant Standard and Merchant Professional packages, answer the question “What do shoppers do on my site?” While the trails can not be analyzed in aggregate across multiple shoppers, they can provide some additional insight into the behavior of customers on your site.

You can access Click Trails under the Statistics column in the Store Manager. You will see links to the last five days of trails for your store. You will also see links to filter your click trails based on behavior. Here is what is shown and what you can learn from it:

• Total trails: This will be the largest set of data and will include the paths of all customers within your store for the selected day. You can look quickly through these to see where people start within your site, where they go first, and what is the last page viewed. If visitors start on a section page and end on a product page, they may just be comparing prices. If you want to be the price leader on those products, you can use this information to add content explaining that you have the lowest price or you will match the lowest advertised price. Keep in mind though that you need to look at many trails to decide what action to take—one visitor’s path is not representative of all so don’t base any changes on a limited number of observations. Look for trends and patterns you see over and over.
• Trails where order button was pressed: This filters to show only trails where the order button was pressed, noted in the trail by “into shopping basket”. For example:
  Feb 20 15:35:08 Casa e Tavola Front Page
  Feb 20 15:35:13 Table Runners
  Feb 20 15:35:16 Fiesta Table Runners
  Feb 20 15:35:26 70″ Fiesta Table Runner Mayan Purple
  Feb 20 15:37:35 70″ Fiesta Table Runner Mayan Purple into shopping basket
  Feb 20 15:37:35 Show shopping basket This trail shows the visitor started on the home page, went to a section page (table runners), selected a sub-section (Fiesta Table Runners), and viewed and added a specific item to the cart.Look more carefully at orders where the order button was pressed. This shows customers that are likely interested in purchasing products. Sometimes people may just add to cart to see your shipping costs. Are you showing shipping costs in the shopping cart (available with Checkout Manager)? If not, you may wish to consider this. If customers are adding items but not completing checkout, what text or links do you have to convince them ordering is secure and private? If shoppers go to your Info page, they may be looking for more information (refund policy, shipping rates, etc) before purchasing. Add any information that may be missing, or links to the information.
• Trails that resulted in an order: These trails show paths where a shopper completed a purchase. You can use these successful paths to confirm what you are doing well. Compare these trails with those where items were added but not purchased. You can also see if the customer viewed other pages in your site after placing the order. This can help you target cross-sell items if shoppers buying one item consistently look at other items.

As mentioned, there is a lot of information to see in Click Trails. You probably don’t have the time to view them each day or even once a week, but when you have spare time you can use Click Trails as another set of data in optimizing your store.

Happy trails!

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business