Before we get down to business, we should explain what we were trying to accomplish when we laid off our agencies, incorporated digital marketing and user journey management internally, and undid all of their (expensive) work. Our business has two faces. Wholesale and retail. We manufacture products and then sell them, both to stores and to individual customers. Our website handles both, but is designed to divert wholesale customers to their own dedicated subdomain.

I got it? Here’s the thing … our agencies didn’t. They were obsessed with the “user journey”, but could not accept that our website had two conversion criteria. First, the typical ecommerce conversion funnel: a user lands on the site, goes to a product page, adds it to the 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; Head over to a product page, decide they 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 processed internally manually. Old school or what?

Our agencies were great, but they just couldn’t understand the fact that we had two potential user trips. So we broke up and got a little freaky.

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 did not 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 saw was that the average nonconverter 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 that. But what was interesting was why people dropped out.

Allowing for a percentage who simply did not want to buy or store our products, we saw that the third page (second click) a saw without a converter was rarely the same as a converter. Non-converting people got to our product pages TOO FAST. They saw our products before they bought our business.

Our products are not cheap. They are not expensive either, the average is £ 25 retail. But to spend that on a beard grooming kit or a selection of bath oils, you must really love the fact that they are handmade, all-natural, cruelty-free, etc. Once you realize that this is an aspirational product, you are suddenly more likely to buy. Or not. It’s fine. By following the traditional spirit of pushing people to a product page with a big call-to-action button and lots of pretty images, we ignore the fact that high-end customers buy a lifestyle, not a product.

Clearly, we didn’t catch all of that in five minutes on the Google Analytics user flow page. It took a bit of time and filter tinkering 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, you are wrong in this case. Each user looks for slightly different things. Let’s use an example that you are 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:

Land on the landing page promoting their Keyword Explorer → Access a CTA, enter email address → a presentation is shown on how Rank Tracker and Keyword Explorer allow them to find new keywords and keep track of your success in existing goals → Contests, you subscribe.

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

Moz couldn’t know what my key considerations are. I certainly didn’t Googled “SEO tools to make my boss smile” and land on a specific landing page for that query. I Googled “Good SEO Tools”, found them, and joined.

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

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

A user who comes to the website and sees content relevant to their personal needs.

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

Step 3: remove the signs, improve the roads

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

Right away, we saw a difference. A smaller 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 overall number of conversions was unchanged … but at least we hadn’t regressed.

Next, we needed to help people navigate the site much more easily. With no pop-ups or custom links to show them the way, some users were getting lost. Traffic to our Privacy Policy increased by 27%. There’s no way 27% more people wanted 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. They didn’t really look that bad, but they weren’t the easiest things to navigate. So instead we made a sacrifice. Our main menu now offers you just a few options:

• Editions

• Gifts for men

• Gifts for women

• Wholesale

• Login Create account

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

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

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

Did we learn our lesson and stick to it? Of course not …

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 pretty 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 that we have abandoned the plan and have taken a different direction. I say that … I mean me. I run the website. Time to get my finger out and get back to basics (again)!