A Lesson Learned in Data

At the beginning of each week, I build a report to track the conversion rates of all our websites. I do this to ensure that each and every one of our sites and campaigns perform at the highest possible level. It also helps me to see where I need to focus more of my attention.

This Monday, I noticed in my data that two sites had drastically dropped off on lead volume. I began to investigate, and what I found has caused me to go back and look further into sites and the analytics that are in use. I will say it was a little startling; a couple sites had inconsistent link names. As an example my goal funnel would look for school_name-step-1 but at times would appear as school_name_-step-1.

I found this trend to be consistent with all the pages in the goal funnel that I had set up. So each time the funnel encountered the incorrect name it treated it as though the visitor had left the funnel. The quick solution was to build two separate funnels that tracked each version of the link name. The long-term solution would be to have the programmers dig in and find why the pages are changing.

So just because your conversions may seem off, don’t jump to conclusions and start a whole conversion rate audit right away. You or your analytics may be missing something. Make sure that you check to see that nothing was overlooked, or that there aren’t pages that are mistakingly called one thing, when they are really another.

I will say that playing sleuth,  has really improved my conversion rates!

Michael Bowen is the Performance Analyst at Geary +PMG.