Decision-Page Metrics: Measuring the Moment of Truth
With the analytics horsepower broadly accessible to e-commerce marketers today, there's certainly no shortage of metrics to study and interpret. From landing-page penetration to funnel abandonment, and everything in between, there are so many metrics available that it's hard to imagine how anything significant could possibly be overlooked.
However, in our e-commerce optimization practice we usually find that no matter how well-stocked our clients' analytics arsenals might be, they are usually lacking a powerful set of metrics surrounding what we call "decision pages."
What Are They and Why Are They Important?
Decision pages are simply those pages where visitors are presented with an offer. Most often, these pages will describe a particular product or service and communicate its specific benefits and features. On these pages, the visitor is also presented with the price of the product or service and a button with which to "buy" or "add to cart." Sometimes visitors can access even more detailed information about the product or service from these pages, but as presented, these pages represent the "essence" of the offer.
On a typical retail e-commerce site, the decision pages are usually the individual product pages. On other types of sites, the decision pages might be service description pages or sales-letter pages.
Regardless of the specific location, decision pages are where visitors are exposed to the total "package" — features, benefits, price, etc. Decision pages are where visitors really begin to evaluate the whole offer — logically, emotionally and economically. And as the moniker would imply, decision pages are where visitors formulate an initial purchase decision — deciding whether or not to put the item into their cart, or otherwise move forward to the next step in the sales cycle.
Decision-page dynamics are so important to understand because they are where almost everything comes together in the shoppers' minds. Decision pages are the critical pivot-point in the whole purchase cycle. As such, decision-page dynamics represent the moment of truth — tactically and strategically. It's really pretty simple: dropping the ball at the decision page means losing the order.
In our consulting practice, we leverage a number of powerful decision-page metrics to help with everything from conversion ratio improvement and order-size maximization to pricing optimization and strategy formulation. We can't cover everything in this article, but we'll outline the basics for you.
Are Visitors Reaching Your Decision Pages?
The first thing to understand is whether or not, generally speaking, your visitors are even reaching your decision pages in the first place. Depending on the depth and breadth of the product line, and the complexity of the product selection process, it's not uncommon for there to be a huge amount of fallout before the decision pages-it's not good, of course, but it's not uncommon. Obviously, it's important to minimize this fallout and get as many visitors as possible into a position to view and evaluate your offers.
In measuring this first aspect, you'll want to use a funnel metric rather than relying on individual page traffic reports. The multiple-counting in page traffic reports can be very misleading.
A certain amount of fallout is expected, but there are a number of common strategic and tactical causes for more significant pre-decision-page fallout. Strategically, lead generation efforts may be poorly targeted; the product line may be lacking; or the initial vendor impression being conveyed may be giving visitors pause. Tactically, entry pages may be far too heavy and slow; category and product navigation may be confusing; or tools such as product search may not be functioning properly or as expected.
Are Decision-Page Visitors Taking The Next Step?
The next thing you'll want to understand in a general sense is whether or not visitors who reach your decision pages are taking the next step in the purchase cycle, to the shopping cart, for example. Visitors to your decision pages have demonstrated a solid interest in the product being offered and, as such, they are somewhat qualified prospects. Using a funnel metric to understand these prospects' willingness to take the next step at this stage is extremely valuable and actionable information.
This particular ratio can be quite revealing. Remember, visitors at this stage are evaluating the whole package and essentially voting with their mouse-clicks.
Low next-step conversion ratios are often telling you that your offers are not strategically sound in the eyes of most prospects. Often this means that the pricing or investment level is all wrong; that the overall value isn't being communicated fully or clearly; that the products are lacking some crucial feature or benefit; or that some important vendor-criteria just isn't being met.
How Are Specific Decision Pages Doing?
In our optimization practice, we often find that e-commerce marketers are lacking a true understanding of how demand is actually breaking out on their sites. Of course, these marketers understand very well how their sales are ultimately breaking out. But demand and sales are very different things, and, understanding demand is by far the more important of the two.
By visiting decision-pages, your prospects and visitors are once again voting with their mouse-clicks and telling you what they are interested in, regardless of your ability at that point to actually sell it to them. This demonstrated interest is a reflection of demand. Sales, on the other hand, are merely a reflection of your ability to satisfy some portion of that demand — sales are not necessarily an accurate reflection of the overall demand itself.
In other words, while you may get a lot of sales for widgets, actual demand on your site may be much, much higher for gizmos. By understanding this dynamic, you can take action to better-align your offerings with true demand and tap into this ready source of profitable growth.
By analyzing page traffic reports and identifying the most popular decision pages, you're gaining solid insight into how demand is really flowing on your site. You can then compare this demand-side perspective with the sales-side reality and begin to understand the most meaningful gaps between the two. You can even quantify the gap between demand and sales — revealing the tremendous profit-impacts of just getting your offerings into better-alignment with existing demand.
Measure Your Moment of Truth
Of course, we've only touched on a few of the basic applications of decision-page metrics in this article. (The more advanced applications will have to wait for another time.) But we hope we've been able to illustrate for you just how powerful this set of relatively obscure measurements can be for driving more profitable e-commerce growth.
And while adding more metrics to your already overflowing arsenal may not be that appealing, we encourage you to make room. For the purposes of improving e-commerce profitability and growth, we've found that measuring the moment of truth is hard to beat.
Rafe VanDenBerg is the founder and president of Business Development
Xcellerator, Inc. The creator and architect of the Xcelleration Process, he
helps companies large and small to optimize and improve their online sales
and marketing-ultimately producing more growth and profits. Prior to founding BDXi, Rafe held a number of executive-level sales and marketing positions in a variety of industries. Most notably, Rafe was a key
member of the team that founded e-commerce giant and direct-marketer,
Crucial Technology. During his tenure, Crucial achieved sales in excess of
$500 million in less than four years-growing to become one of the top two
brands in the category, expanding into Europe and Asia, and winning numerous
awards for customer service and e-commerce excellence.
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Decision-Page Metrics: Measuring the Moment of Truth