4 Questions To Ask When Building Your Digital Marketing Conversion Funnel

In the always saturated realm of digital marketing, it’s critical to know the path your customer’s take on the way to conversion. Identifying the steps your consumers take can make the difference between marketing success and failure. With a clear visualization of your customer’s journey, you can identify what digital marketing strategies work best to drive conversions. This information can help you build a conversion funnel, showing you which touchpoints are critical to customer’s taking your ideal actions. However, tracking the conversion funnel can be difficult. 

Most marketers don’t know where to start mapping the digital conversion funnel, much less, optimize it. So, what is the best way to get started without getting lost? We talked to Search Talk Live about four questions that can help any business build an effective digital conversion funnel.

How are people getting to my website and into the conversion process?

Take a look at your product and your industry space. 

If you’re a business or service that hasn’t been on the market long, you’ll likely have to spend a lot of time building general brand awareness. This is a necessary step before potential consumers feel as if they have enough information to visit your website. Typically, consumers at the top of the marketing funnel move through several stages before converting. You’ll need to know what these stages are to anticipate to create content that pushes users through the funnel. Once those steps are established, you can look to discover your average conversion rate.

In comparison, If you’re a notable brand, your consumer’s path may look vastly different. Consumers may feel comfortable enough about your product to already be further along the digital marketing conversion funnel. This may include the user considering a product for purchase or skipping right to the conversion step.

Whether you’re a start-up or a Fortune 500 business, start your marketing strategy by figuring out your potential customer’s path to your website. This will enable you to create tailored messaging in your digital campaigns. 

What are the top referring sources to my website?

A digital conversion funnel isn’t solely influenced by digital ad channels. It’s impacted by every marketing tactic you deploy. 

By examining the traffic sources to your website, you gain insight into what type of messaging works best to reach your audience. Don’t just look at digital advertising sources either. Users that visit your site from public relations efforts and organic social media content that has been shared produce valuable interactions with your brand.

Understanding your top referring sources is much easier if you have proper tracking set up for both online and offline digital marketing efforts. Without tracking data, you’ll likely lack enough information to determine the top referring sources to your website. A great tool for tracking online efforts is through Google Analytics. 

The clues found in your top referring sites will help you further refine your overall marketing strategy.

What’s the user’s path through your website?

Users’ actions on your website are just as important as the sources that brought them to the site. In the same way that consumers take a journey to your website, they adventure through the site itself. Ultimately, the way the user feels about your site will determine if they complete a conversion action or not.

This is another area where Google Analytics can provide valuable insights. By analyzing metrics such as pages per session, time spent on-page, and bounce rate, a conversion funnel can quickly be identified. Analyze this information with a critical eye. For example, a high bounce rate could indicate you aren’t driving the right audience to your website or you’re attracting the right people and providing quick access to the converting action. 

By understanding a user’s path throughout your website, you can establish how your site structure, loading speeds, and overall user experience impacts the possibility of conversion. This path may also identify areas of your online marketing strategy that need improvements. 

What’s the time-lapse from awareness to conversion?

Different types of purchases take different lengths of time for different customers. Knowing this information is critical to marketing success. 

Most people don’t buy a car on their first visit to a dealership, and many don’t spend weeks shopping around for cell phone chargers. So while the time needed to convert varies between any given product or service on the market, you can dive into your analytics to understand purchasing behaviors.

By diving into your data, you can see several pieces of valuable information. For example, you can discover how many days it takes a first-time visitor to make a conversion. Or how many touchpoints users encounter before converting or leaving the site. This will give you a better visualization of your conversion funnel and help determine if remarketing is an effort to engage in. 

From the touchpoint data, you can infer what marketing tactics you need to deploy for each stage of the customer journey. If it takes six touchpoints with your marketing message before a conversion, you may want to change your digital ad copy or add a landing page to speed up the conversion process.

By answering the above four questions, your initial digital conversion funnel will start to take shape. It’s crucial not to establish one sole conversion funnel and never revisit it again. Consumer behaviors change continuously, meaning that digital conversion funnels are more fluid than static. 

Do you struggle with optimizing your digital conversion rates? Let’s talk.