Before we get down to business, we need to explain what we were trying to accomplish when we fired our agencies, brought digital marketing and user journey management in-house, and undone all their (expensive) work. Our business has two faces. Wholesale and retail. We make products and then we sell them, both to stores and to individual customers. Our website handles both, but is designed to entertain wholesale customers with their own dedicated subdomain.

I got it? Here’s the thing… our agencies didn’t do it. They were obsessed with the “user journey” but couldn’t accept that our website had two conversion criteria. First, the typical eCommerce funnel: a user lands on the site, goes to a product page, adds to cart, goes to checkout, and buys a product. That’s conversion number one.

Conversion number two is a bit more complicated and is reserved for potential wholesale customers. In this case, they land on the site; go to a product page, decide you want to stock that product, click the wholesale button and go to one of our wholesale landing pages. Here, they fill out a form which is then manually processed internally. Old school or what?

Our agencies were great, but they just couldn’t wrap their head around the fact that we had two potential user journeys. So we split up and got a little geeky.

Stage 1: Google Analytics User Flow

The User Flow tool in Google Analytics can be very useful and completely useless. We were only interested in people who didn’t convert against any of our criteria. After spending a lot of time reading forums and support articles until we figured out how to identify these people, we managed to isolate things a bit.

What we found was that the average number of people who didn’t convert dropped after three interactions. Unsurprisingly, the average converter completes interactions before placing an order. You don’t have to be a data scientist to hypothesize about it. But the interesting thing was why people left.

Allowing for a percentage that simply didn’t want to buy or stock our products, we found that the third page (second click) a saw without a converter was rarely the same as a converter. People who didn’t convert were landing on our product pages TOO QUICKLY. They were looking at our products before they bought our business.

Our products are not cheap. They’re not expensive either: the average is £25 retail. But to spend that on a beard care kit or a selection of bath oils, you have to love the fact that they’re handmade, all-natural, cruelty-free, etc. Once you realize it’s an aspirational product, you’re suddenly more likely to buy it. But no. Alright. By following the traditional ethos of pushing people to a product page with a big CTA button and lots of pretty images, we were ignoring the fact that high-end customers buy a lifestyle, not a product.

Clearly, we don’t capture all of that in five minutes on the Google Analytics User Flow page. It took a bit of time and playing around with the filters to create specific segments. But it was time well spent.

Step 2: What is the perfect user journey?

You’re going to have to believe me here. There is no perfect user journey. Your consultant will tell you otherwise, but honestly, they’re wrong on this one. Each user looks for slightly different things. Let’s use an example you’re familiar with.

Moz. Formerly SEO Moz. It is great software. If you sat down and wrote the perfect user journey that resulted in a subscription for them, it might look like this:

Lands on landing page promoting their Keyword Explorer → Hits a call to action, enters email address → Shows a presentation on how Rank Tracker and Keyword Explorer allow them to find new keywords and track your success on existing goals → Conversations, subscriptions.

That’s great. Rand Fishkin is delighted. His company has a new subscriber. But that user flow only works for a certain segment of visitors. Take me… I really don’t care much if I rank 8 or 9 for a secondary keyword. I care about the traffic coming to the site and I track this with the Landing Pages tab in Google Analytics. What matters to me (and the reason I have a Moz subscription) is that it creates beautiful charts of our hits. I show these graphs to our MD who smiles.

Moz couldn’t possibly know what my key considerations are. I certainly didn’t Google “SEO tools to make my boss smile” and landed on a specific landing page for that query. I googled “good SEO tools”, found them and joined.

I only use the Moz example because you’ve heard of them. They are a great company and I wouldn’t dream of telling them what to do.

Back to the question. What is the perfect user journey? Well, it’s this:

A user who lands on the website and sees content relevant to their personal need.

We can’t predict what that is. Okay, we make and sell gifts, so you’ll probably want to buy someone a gift (or store gifts in your shop). If we’re really lucky, they’ll land on a specific page, like “Gifts for Dads.” That person probably wants to buy something for his dad. But invariably, those who click directly on a product from there will not buy it. It’s the people who click a lot that end up converting.

Step 3: Remove Signs, Improve Paths

Since we couldn’t isolate exactly which user journey would drive each user to a conversion, we discarded the signals. That meant removing pop-ups, deciphering all custom links, and making big calls-to-action much more subtle. Our website was a quieter place.

Immediately, we saw a difference. A lower percentage of traffic even visited a product page. But of those that did, a higher percentage met one of our conversion goals. This was not significant as the number of conversions was generally flat… but at least we didn’t go backwards.

Next, we needed to help people find their way around the site much more easily. With no popups or custom links to show them the way, some users were missing out. Traffic to our Privacy Policy increased by 27%. There’s no way 27% more people would want to read it… they just accidentally ended up there.

At this point, like most eCommerce websites, we had huge mega menus. Clicking led to clicking which led to clicking. Actually, they didn’t look too bad, but they weren’t the easiest things to navigate. So instead we did a culling. Our main menu now gave you just a few options:

• editions
• gifts for men
• gifts for women
• Wholesale
• Login Create account

On the home page alone, these were accompanied by some additional links to our About Us page and other similar information.

The big news? Conversions are up! Not just direct sales, which only improved about 7%. But wholesale inquiries are up a massive 19%! When you’re in the business of supplying stores, that’s really important.

Therefore, we ignore convention and deliberately remove all of our user journey optimization. However, our number of conversion trips increased.

Did we learn our lesson and stick to it? Of course, no…

Step 4: Don’t lose sight of your goals

If you head over to https://www.menssociety.com now, you’ll see that our main menu has started to get pretty cluttered. There are many more options. The home page is quite busy. There is only one link to the About Us section. There are buttons on some pages to take you to the next destination.

It seems we have abandoned the plan and gone in a different direction. I say we… I mean me. I run the website. Time to stick my finger out and get back to basics (again)!