A bookshop built by Escher

In your physical bookshop, customers will enter, move around and finally exit the premises in a manner that is largely dictated by your floor plan and accepted laws of physics. It would give you quite a shock if, one day, you were to witness a customer suddenly blinking into existence next to the gardening bookshelf at the back of your shop. Imagine if you tried to approach this ghostly shopper, only for her to simply vanish into thin air, then instantly reappear in a different part of the shop, before finally disappearing altogether, never to be seen or heard of again. You would probably be seriously questioning your grip on reality. This unlikely-sounding scenario happens all the time in the online version of your shop.

Scanning a Google Analytics report will show you that your website’s visitors do not always enter through the front door (the home page), nor do they usually leave your site in orderly fashion past the checkout point. Product (catalogue) websites can have many pages – even a small online bookseller can easily accumulate several hundred product pages on their site, multiplying the number of possible entry and exit points available to site visitors. Apart from identifying these pages for you and indicating the number of visitors and average time spent on a landing page, Google Analytics provides you with a range of comparative metrics and dimensions to really drill down into the data for valuable insights. Apart from analysing data, don’t forget to actually look at the major landing pages, and remember that one of the most important things you are trying to figure out is how well the needs and expectations of visitors are being satisfied by the landing page, and what they do as a next step.
The analytics data might also tell you that a fair number of site visitors arrived at a page on your site and then quickly exited without viewing any further pages. These ‘bounces’ can leave you feeling like you have been unceremoniously dumped seconds after the start of a blind-date and asking all sorts of self-recriminating questions – ‘Was it something I said, or forgot to mention?’, ‘Were you expecting someone else?’ and so on and so forth. Understanding the causes of these bounces and reducing the bounce rate (the percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from your site after viewing only one page) is something that rightly preoccupies savvy website owners. Unless your website content is misleading, at least some of these bounces represent lost revenue opportunities.
For a moment, put yourself into the intangible shoes of our mysterious ghost-shopper. What questions might she asking herself when she materialised out of nowhere in front of your gardening section? ‘What am I doing on this page?’, ‘How do I get to…’, ‘These aren’t the books I’m looking for, I wonder if this shop can help me find …’, ‘Why should I buy from you?’, ‘I’m not only looking for a book, I’m looking for a specific service – how can I find it?’
Just because a visitor could find the answers to these questions if they took the time to use your website’s navigation panel is completely irrelevant if the data shows you that many bounces occur in a matter of seconds. If a customer visits a physical shop they would object to having to read through a massive directory just to find the particular shred of information they are looking for – so why should this be any different for an online customer?
The weakness of many websites is that their content structure unconsciously mimics the physical business and combines this with the linearity of printed books. This is also evident on bookseller websites. Buried deep within their pages is information about services such as concessions for book clubs, free delivery within local areas and the ability to order books not listed on the website. In many cases these gems are absent from the product pages themselves, even though one of these services could be what is needed to convince a prospective customer to proceed with a purchase.
As opposed to following the idealised conversion funnels we have set out for them, site visitors interact with the online environment in ways more akin to the mind-warping scene depicted in M.C. Escher’s 1953 Relativity lithographic. Once we recognise this, we will see that instead of relying on linear navigation structures to lead the customer to important pieces of information, we need to ensure that key information is visible to the customer, wherever they might be on our site.
By taking the time to analyse and understand important user journeys on our websites, making our OVPs (online value propositions) more visible and persistent, and by pre-empting and addressing key customer questions and concerns before they even ask for them we could go quite some way to reducing bounce rates and increasing sales and other website objectives.

Alan Vesty

Alan Vesty is a Quirk-accredited digital marketer, and manages a growing suite of digital assets for the African Branch of Cambridge University Press.