Glossary Terms:
- Lead: Someone who might be interested in what you offer
- User Flow: The path a visitor takes once arriving on your website; the order of pages they visit
- Entry/Landing Page: The first page on your website that a visitor sees
- Conversion: When a lead takes your desired action (like signing up or filling out a contact form), that equates to one conversion
- Outlink: A link that takes visitors away from your website to another site
Introduction to Website Marketing Series
This is the third post in our Introduction to Website Marketing Series. Our first post, Creating a Purpose-Driven Website that Converts, explains the steps to take to set up the site for success. You researched your audience and anticipated the likely pages needed to create an effortless user flow, or path, for your visitor to take through your website, but you're not getting the results you expected. Even with a well-thought-out site, you don't see the conversion numbers you hoped for.
Visitors don't always follow the path we expect them to take. They might arrive on your website from difference places:
- Search engines like Google
- Your email newsletter
- A social media post
- Other marketing campaigns
Each visitor might have different interests based on which campaign brought them to your site. See our second series post, Highlighting Your Strategic Edge to Drive Traffic, for more on methods of driving traffic.
Tracking how people use your website
To measure your success, you need to know which paths are the most effective and which are not working as intended. You need to understand:
- Which page your visitors enter on
- Where they go to next
- Which page they leave from
Knowing how each page performs gives you an opportunity to make optimizations. Analyzing the most common flows lets you tailor the content of your site for improved conversions. (We'll talk more about conversion optimizations in our next post!)
You can find your user flow data on your Matomo dashboard. If this is your first time hearing about the analytics dashboard, check out our post Getting More from Your Website Analytics: Using the Online Dashboard. Let's look at how to use Matomo's reports to see where visitors go on your website.
The big picture - user flow report
First, let's get an overview of how people move through your site:
- Log in to your dashboard
- Find "Users Flow" report under "Behaviour" in the left sidebar.
- Set the date range at the top (previous six months is recommended)
Here, we're looking at the most commons paths your visitors are taking once they arrive.
In this example, we can see that:
- Many visitors enter on our homepage (A)
- Many then click an outlink and return or reload the page (B)
- Traffic then splits between Services, Blog, and People pages (C)
- Some go directly from homepage (A) to Blog (D)
From this data, I'm interested in investigating the outlink vs. exit data. Why are people going from the homepage back to the homepage (A to B)? Are they clicking external links and coming back? Or are they leaving without interacting with the site at all?
Zooming in - transitions report
To answer the questions above we need to know what traffic numbers look like from the homepage. Let's review how to analyze specific pages. We can find this data using the Transitions Report:
- Make a note of each page in your user flow above to study each transition report
- Find "Entry pages" report under "Behaviour" in the left sidebar. (This report tells you which pages draw the most people to your website).
- Set the date range at the top (previous six months is recommended).
- Hover over the first page in your user flow. In our example we selected / which is the homepage. While hovering, click the Open Transitions button.
A window will appear showing incoming and outgoing traffic from the page you selected. Be sure to review the internal pages, the outlinks, the downloads if applicable, and the exit numbers.
This is an interactive report. You should be able to click on the accordion sections to reveal more data! You can also click on the internal page links as shortcuts to view the corresponding transition report.
In this example, we see a high exit rate from the homepage. An area of improvement may be more compelling calls-to-action (buttons or links that encourage visitors to take an action).
What to look for in your reports
As you study your reports, watch for these potential issues:
- Unexpectedly popular pages
- High exit rates on important pages
- Paths that differ from what you planned
Possible improvements:
If you find problems look into why they may be occurring and how you can improve your website. Consider:
- Calls-to-action: Make your buttons and links more compelling. Should links or blocks swap places?
- Simplifying layout: Make your pages easier to use. Can the content be simplified?
- Speeding up your site: If images are too large, the page may not be loading fast enough for visitors to stay.
- Reviewing content: Make sure page titles match the content and you're providing valuable information.
Compare mobile and desktop traffic
Mobile and desktop visitors might use your site differently. A segment is a way of looking at a portion of your traffic. Make a segment for mobile traffic and a segment for desktop traffic to review for more possible improvements.
To create a new segment:
- Click "All Visits" next to the date selector.
- Add a new segment.
- Name it (e.g., "Mobile Traffic").
- Change the "Actions in Visit" drop-down to "Device type" using the search feature.
- Choose "Smartphone" or "Desktop".
- At the top, change the segmented report to process in real time.
Save and Apply.
With your new segment selected, follow the steps above to review the transition report with a more narrow lens.
Next steps
With access to more data, you can begin to make informed decisions about your website. Try different approaches to content and layout until you are satisfied with how visitors move through your site and make iterations on content and layout until you are satisfied with your website's flow.
In our next and final website marketing series post, we'll discuss conversion optimizations for your website.