Optimizing for better online conversion is, for the most part, something we do by examining our content and its layout, such as landing pages and immediate pages in our funnels – and hopefully applying some sort of testing methodology. This is a standard practice I most certainly agree upon, but I also believe that one needs to look outside this, sometimes, closed loop of pages.

I suggest, as an alternative, that you try using a Page Revenue Participation metric for your next Conversion Optimization routine, as it might reveal opportunities away from your traditional funnel. When debating this, please note that, I am purely talking about Controlled On site Content, as defined by the Online Business Measurement Quadrant.

The reason for brining this up; I only just returned from Boston, where I attended the Internet Retailer conference, and probably even more exciting the Yahoo! Merchant Summit, which was delivered in conjunction with the show (On that note, the ystoreblog folks did a respectable pre-show interview about YWA 9.5 and my book). Anywho; the merchant owners had some of the most honest analytics questions I’ve heard in a long time. You simply cannot wow these folks with a posh looking four-dimensional bubble chart – they wanted to know exactly HOW we are going to help them make more money!!) – Refreshing!

A small disclaimer; all of the below screen-shots are from Yahoo! Web Analytics, but you have the same metric available in e.g. Omniture Site Catalyst and even though Google Analytics have a different term ($ index) and slightly different calculation, it is the same optimization attitude.

So how do I use a Page Revenue Participation metric for my next Conversion Optimization routine ?

1.

Go find your most popular pages report, which in most tools, means a report that shows a sorted list of all your pages, with the one receiving the most page views on top. By most standards, this report does not provide much insight, unless you derive your revenue from page views (such as advertising) – fair enough, then this might not be a bad proxy for $money.

2.

Customize this particular report in a way, so that you get your tools revenue participation metric appended to it. In Yahoo! Web Analytics the Revenue Participation metric resides under the sales group under metrics, when using the Custom Report wizard.

3.

The below figure, shows a standard most popular pages report, which have had the revenue participation metric added to it. This is almost per default, and with out much fingering, a better choice than just looking at raw page view numbers.

4.

Fingering or not! I am a big fan of visualizing data and the below screen shot is essentially just an advert for data visualization (but also, potentially, a  honest report export, that will create better value than a non colored bar chart). The below bar chart was extended to 100 bars and had its bars colored by the revenue participation metric. This alone brings instant insight, as we can spot easily spot “small green bars” – or more precisely, low page view volume combined with high revenue participation (a.k.a. important pages). We could of course expand this with more rows of data or just sift through the bars a hundred at a time.

5.

What I really like for you to do, is to change the sorting from page views to revenue participation. This changes the picture completely and it is the essence of my suggestion for you trying out a Page Revenue Participation metric for your next Conversion Optimization routine. This should in a best case scenario bring forth a set of pages, that you might not see as active drivers for conversion today.

The last X steps in your funnels, which are required for people to check out, will of course always be on top, and if you are anal (like me), I suggest you go filter them away, so you only have pure content in this report. Especially if you have to communicate this beyond yourself or your close team.

The below shows a astonishing set of facts:

• The “About us” Page Touched 23% of revenue in < 1% of visits
• Site Search participates in about 50% of all my revenue.

Knowing these two facts (which will be completely different from site to site) I hope one would set out to work on the “About us” pages AND closely look at those internal site search result pages. For these folks, their business clearly depend on it.

6.

As a closing comment; not that the upper commentary need further input, it is obvious that neither “About us” or “Search” is part of your traditional funnel analysis as below – and as such we sometimes forget to look outside our funnel.

Doing a better “About us” page, in this example, even though it is not part of the funnel, is likely to widen the funnel – and if that is not exciting I don’t know what it.

This is not the first time I talked about revenue participation per say and if you are still listening, the post about how you can Use Web Analytics to determine the width of your Internal Search Query box might be worth a read.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis Mortensen (@dennismortensen)