The content analysis is the key to optimizing your digital content. It has the power to align the client and the project team to go into their design sprint knowing and understanding the user friction within the experience, so they can focus on solving the highest revenue issues first through design.
A thorough audit will empower you to answer 3 questions:
What is your goal?
What do you want your users to be able to do?
How will you measure success?
How do I know they have done it?
Why will this be valuable?
What value will this deliver to both your users and the business?
What are the affects to the revenue/brand?
Your analysis deliverable needs to
Identify opportunities based on user friction within the digital channel and quantify the impacts to the business.
By contextualizing Voice of the Customer (VoC) feedback
Qualify and quantify user friction points within the digital experience
Conduct content audit in context of identifying when/where/how user friction points arise & evolve in the digital channel.
Identify opportunities to optimize the user journey by analyzing when, where, why and how do the metrics raise red flags/highlight areas of friction?
Align teams and stakeholders on prioritizations
Funnels & Conversions
The Funnel defines the steps within the user experience. Each step is associated with a page in the site and the events or interactions on the page, such as click. These are the steps to Conversion.
Let’s look at some different conversion funnels to understand how the steps may vary.
Purchase conversion funnel
If the task you need the user to complete is a purchase transaction, you may have the following series of pages and events in your funnel.
Marketing page
Product list page
Product details page
Product configurations
Add to cart
Configure/edit cart
Checkout
Thank you
Register account conversion funnel
If the task you need the user to complete is to register an account, then you may have the following series of steps and events in your funnel.
Create user name
Create password
Verify account registration
Account registration confirmation
Although each of these funnels have different steps, and only the purchase funnel ends in a sales transaction, both funnel the user down the path to conversion. Both examples are tasks that we want our users to do. Both of these tasks can be measured at each step and/or event.
Funnel steps
For each step, in the conversion funnel, you want to track and measure the user engagement. For example, if task success is your Key Performance Indicator (KPI), then you may want to look at the conversion rate metrics. If the users conversion drop rate is high on a particular step in the funnel, then this can help determine areas of friction.
Inform your audit by leveraging events and errors. Where the funnel tells us what we expect the user to do, measurements empower us to discover what the users are actually doing. This is important because it informs you where & what (backed by data) user friction is occurring. You can then dig into the content surrounding friction points to understand the why.
Analysis
Do you see a low conversion rate? This can indicate there are friction points to go discover.
What are the top events the user is engaging with? Are they what you expected?
Looking at the counts and trend lines over time can indicate if the engagement rates are high or low for these events?
Watch session replays to see what the user experience. What issues did the users experience?
What error are the users encountering? Errors aren't just 404s, timeouts, or bad API calls, they can include friction or struggles as users navigate the experience. This makes error analysis a critical component to understanding what's impacting the user experience.
Conversion
Conversion indicates whether the customer performed an event. It tracks that a sale or other action, such as a new account creation or password change, has completed. In digital, a conversion is a solid measurement defining the overall success of the funnel.
Low conversion rates indicates issues in the experience. Is there something occurring in these sessions that deters the customer from performing an event?
Conversion metrics
Look at the conversion metrics:
Conversion Rate: the % of customers who complete the funnel successfully
Conversion Count: the total number of conversion events in a session
Conversion Value: the total value ($$) of all conversions
Abandoned cart metrics
For a sales funnel, look at the abandoned cart metrics:
Abandoned Cart: customers had items in their cart and exited the funnel without completing their purchase
Abandoned Cart Value: the lost cart value from a customer’s session.
Events
Events are positive milestones that lead to conversions, but can also lead us to improvement opportunities.
Events correspond to
A user action or behavior (such as clicking a button or submitting a form)
A milestone (as in, a page being visited, or stage of a funnel being hit)
Where does this event occur?
These are referred to as being "triggered" when they occur in a session.What needs to happen to move forward in the funnel?
Event Analysis
What are the top events the users are engaging with, and are they what you expected?
Users who engage with support features are often looking for a resolution to a problem.
Look at the counts and historical context for the various contact us events, are the incidence rates high for these events?
Click to the event details. Is there something occurring in these sessions that are deterring users from converting?
What are the conversion rates?
Abandoned carts?
Possible frustration (rage clicks) occurs when users click the same element multiple times.
Watch more than one session replay to see what the customers are actually experiencing
What events triggered?
What errors did the customer experience?
Errors
Errors are events with negative effects (whether or not your user sees them) that contribute to drops in conversion rate.
Where to start
Look for changes in trends within the dashboards that monitor general metrics and KPIs
If you know the error occurring, go directly to the error details page
What to look for
Drop in conversion rate
Increase of error frequency
VoC/Call center reporting complaints
Next steps
Watch session replays
Identify and quantify the impact of any errors in the user experience
High level metrics
% of users that were affected by the error
Occurrences: # of times the error occurred
% of user sessions that got this error
Conversion rate when the error occurred
Trended data broken down by value
Value: count data captured when the error occurred
Paths: page detail where the error occurred
Day: change the view of the trend charts
Featured metrics
Number of users
Sessions: counts how many sessions were impacted by the error
Occurrences: counts how many times the error occurred within these session
Conversion drop rate: % of users that drop from the funnel without converting
Conversion rate: % of users that complete the funnel
Abandoned cart: total value of the carts in these sessions
Number of abandoned carts
Pages
Look to tie error and event occurrences on a specific page. There are 2 ways to approach this
Apply page-specific segment conditions in a query for cross-platform analysis.
Apply a page filter, allowing you to target events or errors that happen on specific pages.
Page Analytics
Visit my blog article Key metrics and what they can tell us about our content. This guide features a few of my favorite metrics to use when analyzing my content audits.
Opportunities
The opportunities help you prioritize the most critical errors occurring within your defined funnel. To quantify the long-term impact if this error were to continue to occur, consider
The annual opportunity for this error
Number of users impacted
Drops in the conversion rate when the error occurs
Trends for this specific error occurrence
Error name and details such as error message or name of the element clicked
Case study
Use case: Existing customer who wanted to participate in an offer to trade in their current device for discounts on an upgrade purchase.
STEP 1: Audit and analyze the funnel. When we looked at the funnel, we saw that the average time to conversion was 22 minutes!
We quickly identified the conversion steps that showed the most time to task completion. This let us know where to drill in.
We captured the data for all customers as our baseline for comparison.
STEP 2: Query the system for your metrics. First, we needed to build a segment to tease out the
session metrics specific to our target audience. Upon segmenting, we document the metrics in our
# of users
# of sessions
# of occurrences
Conversion rate
# of abandoned carts
Annual revenue opportunities
STEP 3: We then used session replays to uncover the customer experience at each step in the conversion funnel.
At each conversion step, where we saw the conversion rate drop, we deep dove into the content and experience to understand what was happening
We documented the conversion steps (UX Flow style)
At each step, we dove into Events & Errors
We pulled the metrics to support the observations and documented in context of the flow using Mural
We allowed team members to layer in their own stickies with insights from VoC, competitive market research and sales, giving us a 360-degree view of the friction points.
We also decided to integrate the content audit into the same mural to keep everything in context of the journey and the metrics
What decision we were asking the customer to make?
What information was needed to make that decision?
If that information was available in context?
Insights we uncovered:
Customers struggled with wayfinding into the flow.
On average, customers configuring between 4-6 products, adding them to the cart only to abandon their carts.
Conversion dropped from ~87% early in the flow to ~8% in the cart. What happened?
We saw that only 6-8% of those who abandoned their cart engaged the call center. Did they go to the retail store, or did they go to a competitor’s site?
Abandoned cart value showed an opportunity of $134 million dollars around this friction point
Validating our hypothesis
QM acted as our entry point into REAL friction points within the experience and gave us direction as to where to dive deeper. Our hypothesis was that customers were using the cart attempting to conduct price comparison research on multiple upgrade devices in context of their trade-in value.Now we were able to layer in some other data sources for validation.
We conducted some customer surveys in User Testing platform to understand what customers were looking for in the digital trade-in experience.
We recruited customers who had completed a trade-in within the last 6 months.
Customers said that their 2 biggest struggles were understanding:
Trade-in value as well as the process
Understanding upgrade pricing with their trade-in promotion applied
We pulled Google’s People Who Ask to find what customers were asking when interested in device trade-in. We found that customers are looking to understand the value, pricing and process for trade-in, further validating our hypothesis.
We conducted a content audit to see if the content answered those questions. In many cases, the content was lacking, and/or the experience just didn’t make sense for a customer participating in trade-in on an upgrade purchase.
Summary
Within this project, the content analysis informed the work for the following areas:
Research
Content strategy
Experience strategy
A/B testing
Design
Copy writing
Business
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