For the past two decades, it’s been hard to talk about sales and marketing without talking about funnel theory.
This basic concept is essential for anyone who wants to understand how leads go from learning about a business to actually buying their products—and especially for anyone who wants to streamline that path.
Of course, anyone in marketing knows that if there’s one thing to keep in mind about your business’s funnel, it’s that it’s always evolving whether you like it or not! As you alter your marketing and sales strategies, your funnel might tilt, shift, or shrink in ways that make it more difficult for buyers to pass through it.
What do you do when this happens? That’s the magic of funnel analysis.
What Is a Funnel Analysis?
Whether you outlined your sales funnel years ago or you’ve never really thought about how yours works, a funnel analysis can help you understand what you need to tweak.
Essentially, a funnel analysis can help you map out the buyer’s journey, understanding how users move from one point to the next. It works as a visualization tool that allows you to identify issues with your funnel, including where users leave and their barriers to moving further toward conversion.
Funnel analysis uses a huge variety of tools and resources to collect information, depending on the type of website and the goals of the analysis. These tools can include pulling information from Google Analytics, placing heat maps on certain pages, recording user sessions, prompting users with on-page surveys, and more.
How Can Funnel Analysis Help Your Business?
Beyond the obvious advantage of a faster, more streamlined marketing and sales process, there are a few key benefits to using funnel analysis on your website.
Find the places where people are leaving the funnel. An analysis of your website can help you identify the pages with the highest bounce rates and lowest conversion rates. Improving these pages can help you remove potential barriers and get more traffic coming further into the funnel.
Understand which channels your high-quality users are coming from. Linked to the benefit above, funnel analysis can also help you identify your highest-performing pages. Focusing on these superstar pages—and what you’re doing right on them—can help you understand and tweak the other parts of your funnel to match.
Make better strategic decisions. With the knowledge above, you’ll be better poised to make big-picture decisions that rely on something stronger than an educated guess. Whether you need to decide how to optimize your campaigns or where to invest your marketing budget, a funnel analysis can help.
Increase conversion rates. Once you’ve used your funnel analysis to tweak the logistics of your funnel, you’ll find it much easier to move leads through the process, generating more conversions and thus more revenue.
The advantages of a funnel analysis are too powerful to pass up. Doing your research to pull the analytics and decipher your findings can be tricky, but the end result is well worth the effort! If you’re ready to take your website to the next level but don’t have the time or expertise to perform your own analysis, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team to learn what we can do.
