ALTHOUGH YOU HOPE YOUR WEBSITE VISITORS will buy eventually, many of them aren’t ready to buy today.
Many website visitors are browsing, looking for information, comparing products, or simply killing time. The same applies offline. Not every consumer who walks into a store will end up buying something. Some people might be window shopping with no particular item in mind, while others might be looking for a good deal. And then there are those people who are ready to buy. Consumers typically go through these five stages before making a buying decision:
Not every buying decision will go through these five distinct stages. If you get hungry in the middle of the night (need recognition), you might skip the information search and evaluation phases and move right to the purchase stage. The length of time it takes a consumer to go through these stages will vary based on a mix of internal and external factors.
Visitors in different buying stages require different sets of information and different styles of presentation to persuade them to convert. Visitors at the need recognition or information search stage are in the beginning of the buying funnel. They have not invested the time to determine the best solution for their need. The evaluation stage indicates that visitors are in the middle of the conversion funnel. Finally, visitors in the purchase stage are at the end of the conversion funnel. These consumers are most likely to convert if you present the right information to them.
Before you can design your website or landing pages for each buying stage, you must decipher the actual stage of each visitor who lands on your website. It is easier to do this offline, where you have the luxury of interacting with the customer, asking questions, and analyzing the situation. Your options are limited online. A good starting point is to analyze keywords that drive visitors to your website and to decode their intent based on these words. You can then use the visitors’ intent as a signal or an indicator of where they are in the buying funnel.
Both single keywords and generic search terms can be loaded with information. They can indicate that a visitor is at an early or late buying stage, or not in a buying stage at all. Other searches might be a lot easier to decipher. Table 5-1 shows the possible intent of visitors when they land on a website after searching for the term “laptop.” A visitor could be looking for product evaluations or reviews, or he might be ready to buy. In each case, the visitor is in some sort of a buying process (mid- or late-stage). The visitor could also be searching for the history of laptops or the latest in laptop technology news, both of which indicate that he is not in any type of a buying process.
|
Perceived intent |
Type of intent |
Actionable |
|
Product evaluation |
Ecommerce |
Yes |
|
Laptop technology |
Knowledge |
Maybe |
|
Laptop history |
Knowledge |
No |
|
Laptop reviews |
Ecommerce |
Yes |
If the visitor gets to the site by searching for a less generic term, such as “laptop reviews” or “laptop history,” you do not have to do a lot of guesswork. The visitor is letting you know what he is looking for. A search for “laptop reviews” indicates that the visitor is in the evaluation of alternatives stage. A visitor with a search term such as “cheap laptops” might also be in a purchase stage, although he is obviously price-sensitive. Finally, there is a very good chance that a visitor who lands on your website after searching for a particular model, “Dell Latitude 8200,” might be in the purchase stage of the buying funnel.
During conversion optimization projects, we use software to mine analytics data for new keywords and for opportunities to understand visitors’ motivations when they land on the site. It is typical for a website to have thousands if not hundreds of thousands of keywords that drive traffic to it. The task of analyzing keywords can be challenging, but here are some guidelines: