As a person who works with e-commerce websites and with websites that sell services, I can say from experience that many people in similar niche have probably been faced with the situation I came across regularly, where traffic to a website is very good, but conversion rate is very low.There could be a number of reasons:
- Your traffic is not targeted.
- Your competitors sell it cheaper.
- You have poor navigation and usability.
- Your selling/registration form is too long.
- Users are confused by poor product description.
I have come across the aforementioned problems on one of my client’s websites Travel Friends.
Despite the volume and quality of traffic Travel Friends was getting, the number of sign-ups the site was getting should be significantly better that it was getting. The site’s conversion rate was extremely low.
I looked at the average session duration and it was 4 minutes.
This is where Yandex Metrica really helped me.
In this case study, I will show you how Yandex Webvisor helped me to increase conversion rate by 230% without spending a penny.
What you will learn:
- What is Yandex Webvisor
- How to enable Yandex Webvisor for your website for free
- How to use Yandex Webvisor to track user behavior
- In video format
- When filling web forms
- Link map analysis
What is Yandex Webvisor
Yandex Webvisor is an important tool every SEO guru, marketer and e-commerce website owner must have. I know a few very good competing tools on the market that offer similar services, but they are not cheap, for example, ClickTale, which cost anything from $99/month to $990/month.
Yandex Webvisor allows you to record every visit your website gets. It offers the flexibility for you to filter users based on their location, browser and other attributes. The captured information can then be played back in video format, this enable you to observe how your website visitors interact with your site contents.
The site featured in this case study, Travel Friends was targeting the keywords/phrases “travel dating” and “travel friends” in the UK.
How to Set Up Yandex Metrica (includes Webvisor) for Free on your Website
This process is very easy. Though Yandex is a Russian search engine; their analytics tool is available in English. By the way, it is very similar to Google Analytics and the set up process is identical to setting up Google Analytics.
- To set it go, go to metrica.yandex.com and create a new account. It will ask you to provide a Yandex powered email address. You can create a new one, for example MrRight@yandex.com during the registration process.
- Once you have registered, click “Add a counter” at the top of the page.
- On the next window, similar to Google Analytics, complete the registration process by providing: counter name and domain name.
- IMPORTANT: click “Counter code” and check “Webvisor, scroll map, form analysis” because it is unchecked by default.
- Now, install Metrica code on all the pages you want to track.
You now have a free tool for record user behavior and you can find out what parts of your website needs to be improved to make the buying/registration process more user friendly, thereby encouraging better conversion.
Three steps to using Yandex Webvisor to track user behavior
On the site used in this case study, it had the landing page below before I started working to improve conversion on the site:
The landing page look reasonable enough, it had all the registration fields and it was not too long, it even had a “Facebook Connect” button. Despite that, the conversion was very poor so I turned my attention on user behavior. Here are the steps I took:
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Recording a video of user interaction to gain insight
Metrica allow you to record up to 1,000 visitors per day. It is more than enough to get a clear idea of what is going on with your website. It usually takes a lot of time to analyse user behavior, but the result could save you and make you a lot of money.
To use Webvisor, go to your Metrica account -> Choose your website counter -> Click Behavior ->WebVisor.
You will see something like this:
Click play button opposite each result to watch a video of what each user did on your site.
Actually it is not necessary to review each visitor because some of them leave your site within a few seconds. It does not mean that your navigation is poor, probably they were looking for something different or clicked your snippet accidentally.
Duration column shows how much time the user spent on your website. Hits means the number of pages user visited.
If you know the source of your traffic or the keywords that needs to be analysed then use “Add criterion” feature. There are many different criterions available:
My landing page had many visitors who spent more than 1 minute, but activity indicator was very poor – they did not click anything and have not even started to fill the form.
Then I noticed one very interesting thing; those who registered on the site at first scrolled to the bottom of the page, where main text was, and only then completed registration form. It showed me that visitors do not know what happens after they’ve signed up. So I added a special block called “Why Choose Travel Friendz” on the new landing page. The benefits of joining the site was listed. A block like that tends to catch users attention very quickly.
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Form analysis.
The form analysis tool is used to see how many visitors interacted with different forms on your pages, including a breakdown of how far they got on the form before abandoning the form or whether they completed the form and what action they perform next. I used the information I gathered from the Form analysis tool to improve the landing page. Here is a comparison of interaction on the landing page before I used Form analysis tool to improve it:
| Old Landing Page | New Landing Page |
|---|---|
| ● On average it has 33 sign up page visitors | ● On average it has 29 sign up page visitors |
| ● 13 did not fill out form | ● 6 did not fill out form |
| ● 20 – 60% engaged with the form | ● 23 – 79% engaged with the form |
| ● 16 times data was not sent | ● 5 times data was not sent |
| ● Only 4 visitors successfully completed the form | ● 18 visitors successfully completed the form |
| ● 14% conversion from those who visited the page | ● 62% conversions from those who visited the page |
That small edit helped to increase conversion rate by 50%. I noticed that a large number of users stopped the registration process just before the last field which was “Upload a picture”.
Why? Because not many people want to share their picture immediately without understanding if your site has everything they were looking for. For example, when you join new social network, do you upload an image immediately or do you review the site and upload your picture when you are ready to be part of the community?
I changed the “Upload a picture” form from mandatory to optional, which encouraged more people to complete the registration process.
Old Landing Page
New Landing page
If you collect conversions data via order forms, contact forms or any other forms, Form analysis tool can help you understand how site users interact with your forms.
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Link Map
This tool help you identify where visitors click on your website and the number of visitors who clicked a given part of your page. Links are highlighted in different colours. Colours translation [from the most popular to least popular] follows:
- Red
- Yellow
- Green
- Blue
- Grey
What I saw?
A large number of visitors clicked city names and even picture of the model on the homepage. City names London, Paris, New York etc was not clickable in the page design, which seem to confuse visitors, especially those who were from the cities listed on the landing page. Visitors probably thought they had to choose a region.
On the new landing page, I moved registration form to the left, completely removed the map and city names.
The Result
After using all the three tools above, I discussed my findings with the client, a new improved landing page was created. The new landing page is shown below.
After about two weeks, how users interact with the new landing page was revised, I was very pleased to see a significant increase in the number of visitors who interacted with the form the way we wanted them to. This lead to a significant increase in conversion for the site.
Version A – 14% conversion rate
Version B – 62% conversion rate
By using Yandex Metrica to analyse user behaviour, you can get more value out of your SEO. Here is a quick summary of what you need to do:
- Measure overall organic traffic over time.
- Segment organic search traffic by landing page.
- Use multi-channel funnels.
- Segment organic search traffic by demographics.
Conclusion
Different SEO consultants have their favourite tools for getting the task of optimising a website or web page for their client done. For me, if I am to list my three top tools/resources I have found incredibly useful for optimising client’s website and helping them gain better conversion, here is what my list will look like:
- Google Analytics
- Ahrefs
- Yandex Metrica
Hopefully this tutorial will go some way towards helping you maximise the traffic to arriving at a website by analysis user behaviors with the use of the fantastic free tool from Yandex called Webisor.