Product Launch and Business Growth Strategies, Tips and Tools

This morning, I decided to invest an hour or so to do some clickstream analysis of recent trial signups and sales conversions for our product launch software.  This is something I try to do on a weekly basis.

By “clickstream”, I’m talking about the sequence of steps a user takes when traversing your website(s).  In particular, I like to do what I will call a “backtrack analysis” – taking a particular conversion and seeing which web pages the user visited and the actions a buyer took prior to making a purchase (or opt-in, etc).

This kind of analysis is extremely important, because:

• It focuses in on the most important visitors to our website:  BUYERS
• It enables us to learn where these buyers are coming from; e.g., search engine, PPC ad, blog entries, etc.
• It illuminates the “path to revenue”; that is, the path that buyers are taking through your site and content, which is where most of your time and effort should be spent doing website optimization
• It highlights which content is triggering a prospect into becoming a buyer
• It provides other insights you cannot get any other way; e.g., what kinds of information buyers are looking at before they make a purchase decision
• It shows you what buyers do AFTER they’ve purchased your product

Unfortunately, the tools provided by Google Analytics are woefully inadequate for doing clickstream analysis properly.  I use a particular tool that does a decent job at clickstream analysis.  It’s called OpenTracker.

OpenTracker records every visit to my website, tracking users by IP address.  It even provides me with a real-time list of visitors.  Here’s what the visitor log looks like (click to enlarge):

In addition to showing recent visitors, which country they are from, how many pages they visited and how long they remained on the site, there’s also a place to enter a visitor’s IP address. This enables one to choose a particular visitor’s clickstream and drill into what took place prior to the sale.

In my case, our shopping cart system records a buyer’s IP address (as do most auto-responders, for example). By entering the customer’s IP address into OpenTracker, I can then see exactly what took place – from the time the customer first arrived at our site to the time they purchased.

So, here is an example of the kind of clickstream information that’s available – not from an actual buyer, but instead from a prospect who found our site via my blog (this site you’re on now) – and then downloaded our free Launch Report.

Note there is no private or personal information tracked here, just publicly available information based on the user’s IP address (this user’s IP address and company name have been blurred in this image for privacy reasons).

Let’s have a closer look at what we can learn from analyzing this prospect’s clickstream.

1. Starting at the bottom, we see the user found my blog and was reading a Product Launch Success Story post, where I interviewed a WinningWare QuickLaunch customer.

2. Next, the user clicked on the link in that post to the full customer case study and audio interview on our product site, WinningWare.com.  That was on June 15th.

3. On August 31st (today), the user returned to my blog with an interest in the product launch interview that Casey Stevens from Australia and I did recently (the post prior to this one)

4. Then the user took a quick look at the products we offer at WinningWare.com (products.php)

5. Then they went back to the home page and clicked on the offer for the Launch Report

6. On the Launch Report landing page, they registered and became a prospect (going onto our auto-responder).  This person is now a “lead” in our system.

7. The user then confirmed their email address (double opt-in), followed by downloading the Launch Report.

8. Five minutes later, the user returned to the WinningWare.com home page and had a look at our Professional Services

9. Next, the user explored our various product launch solutions.  The user spent almost 5 minutes on this page, then had a look at the WinningWare QuickLaunch product overview page.

So what did we learn?  Well, for one thing, we learned that my blog is bringing our business leads.  Our market is interested in the free Launch Report (by the way, I track conversions separately using a different tool – a post for another day).

We also learned that this user has a serious interest in product launches and our site, as they have visited twice during a six week period, and are apparently looking at their options for handling an upcoming product launch.

This user seemed to respond to audio interviews.  Hmmm.  Maybe I should be doing more interviews!

This user is now on our email auto-responder, so they will receive a sequence of emails providing additional useful tips and information – and offers that bring them back to our site periodically.  This clickstream will most likely grow longer over the coming weeks, as the user gets closer to their launch day.

So, I hope this glimpse into how we can use clickstream analysis is helpful.  In my experience, the insights one can gain from examining buyer and prospect behavior is invaluable to understanding what’s working – and what’s not.

Using some inexpensive “point products” like OpenTracker will get you in the ballpark and well on your way to understanding where your buyers are coming from, which obviously affects where you should concentrate your ad and demand-gen efforts.

It will also help you understand what buyers are doing on your site in response to your marketing and online sales process – and importantly, where you should focus to increase your sales conversion results most.

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