Web Marketing: How to Interpret Goal Funnel Data

By John Arnold, Michael Becker, Marty Dickinson, Ian Lurie, and Elizabeth Marsten from Web Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Once you have goal funnel data, you need to know how to interpret and use it. Below is an example of a typical web marketing reporting tool report.

This report shows you, step by step, how many folks move through the process. Check your funnel reports for these items:

The biggest abandonment point: Here we show that only 53 percent of visitors proceed from their shopping baskets to the page where they enter their billing addresses. That’s a loss of customers in the checkout process. If you can reduce that abandonment at that point, you can greatly improve the overall conversion rate.
Unexpected entry points: Here we show where site visitors are entering the checkout process at the Billing Address page. The checkout process starts at the Cart page, and that’s what should be the entry point.

But if you think about it, that must mean that people are adding products to their carts, looking around a bit more, and then moving to the Checkout page. It might make sense, therefore, to add a Proceed Directly to Checkout step.

Put the two together, and you can make one immediate improvement to this cart: Let customers go directly to the Checkout page without first approving their shopping baskets. That would probably reduce instances of bailout.