For the second installment of the Improving conversion series we use analytics data for phinda.com, another lodge from andBeyond that we launched on the same day as Kwandwe. All the lodge sites have the same content structure and page layout, only the content differs.
FIVE SECOND TEST
Following on from our first conversion post we review the relevance of the fivesecondtest.
The top clicks from the home page for 1 Jan 2010 to 5 Feb 2010 were:
FINDING: As suspected there weren’t any relationship between the fivesecondtest results and the actual behaviour of visitors. Although the Africa and India links were immediately noticed very few people clicked on it.
PATH ANALYSIS
Most analytics tools offer numerous reports to evaluate typical visitor paths. These types of reports are problematic to interpret. A common mistake is to look for an ideal path to conversion. There is no such thing! Individuals with a variety of needs, personalities and levels of knowledge are visiting your site.
A better approach is to evaluate bounces and exits for each step to identify conversion opportunties. We start with our Top landing page:
1. Landing page:
• 68% of traffic enters via the home page
• We are happy with the 33% bounce rate. It is well above category average.
2. Second page:
We selected the Path Finder report from 
to evaluate the performance of the second page.
Please note: we couldn’t simply pull the exit rate report for these pages it would not have given us the performance of the page as STEP 2 in a journey.
Entrance -> Landing page -> SECOND PAGE -> Exit
We found that the Safari-lodges page performs the best as a second page from the home page. Only 10% left. Although the exit rate of the other pages is also within acceptable margins we will focus on the Map page to identify conversion improvement opportunities for the next post in the series.
A final test for the second page performance is to see which page is most often the second step in a path that led to a conversion:
The winner is Safari-lodges with 30% and then Specials with 25%. Again it looks like the Map page is best reviewed for conversion opportunity.
February 10th, 2010 at 9:00 am
Quick question. following your train of thought, shouldnt one look beyond the numbers to prioritise conversion opportunities? Considering that this is a travel website and that people are looking for more deals, one would expect specials to have the best stickiness rate (i.e not 3% of maps).
Are the specials actually specials – I was dissapointed after reading your post and visiting the site – the specials didn’t communicate to me what I had been saving, how do I know that these are in fact specials?