Using Kissmetrics to Find Out If You Are Losing Conversions on Mobile

As an online marketer, you probably know that smartphones and tablets are quickly becoming the devices of choice for many everyday tasks. Everything from checking sports scores to shopping is done on mobile. Undoubtedly, some of you are reading this post on a mobile device.

With this surge in mobile usage, it has become imperative for marketers to ensure that their site renders well on all devices. Not only is this important for SEO purposes, but also for conversions. If your mobile site doesn’t render correctly, your conversions will tank, no doubt about it.

The question for marketers is: are you losing conversions on mobile?

This post will show you how you can use Kissmetrics to get the data you need to answer that question.

Using the Kissmetrics Funnel Report to Measure Funnel Performance

Let’s say we’re an E-Commerce clothing store. We get about 100k monthly visitors, and about 2.2% of all visitors convert to purchasing. We haven’t done a lot with our mobile site, but we hear from customers that it can be a little frustrating. We do not offer a mobile app; instead, customers shop through our main site.

We recently signed up for Kissmetrics. This analytics tool will help us measure our marketing performance and show us what’s working and what’s not. One of the ways we’ll measure our performance is with the Funnel Report. This will show us how our funnel is performing and also let us break traffic into groups so we will know how subsets of traffic are performing.

Let’s load the Funnel Report and get a view of last month’s performance.

Looks like about 103k people visited our store during the month, and a little over 3,500 ended up purchasing.

Keep in mind that this is traffic from all devices. Since we’re interested in seeing funnel performance for each device, we’ll segment (group) the data by device type. To do that, we’ll just click the dropdown shown below:

Then, we will have two choices:

• KM Device Type: This breaks down into computer, smartphone, or tablet.
• KM Device Category: This shows whether the visitor came from a computer or mobile. It does not display smartphone or tablet, only mobile.

Both of these are automatically tracked in Kissmetrics.

We’ll choose KM Device Type.

Then, we’ll get a breakdown of traffic by the type of device a person was using.

We have three types of devices we’re tracking:

• Computer – Visitors who came from a laptop or desktop computer.
• Smartphone – Visitors who came from a smartphone running Windows, Android, iOS, etc.
• Tablet – Visitors who came from a tablet, such as Surface, iPad, etc.
• Unknown – Visitors who came from a device, the type of which cannot be detected by Kissmetrics.

Here are some insights we can learn from this data:

• The vast majority of traffic and purchases came from a laptop or desktop computer.
• Conversions were highest on laptop and desktop computers.
• Conversions from mobile (especially tablet) were much lower than from laptop and desktop computers. There appears to be a roadblock in proceeding from step 3 to 4. This is the checkout funnel where users enter their credit card information, shipping address, etc. We can create a micro funnel to see the specific step where visitors are dropping off.

Next, we can create a micro funnel and find the exact pages where would-be customers are dropping off. We’ll create some alternate pages and A/B test them till we find winners across the board (computer, smartphone, and tablet).

Summary

Here is a summary of the process:

• More people are browsing and buying from mobile devices than ever before.
• Websites must be optimized for optimal viewing on mobile devices. This is important not just for SEO, but also for UX and conversions.
• With the Kissmetrics Funnel Report, marketers can track their funnel performance and get a breakdown of how specific groups of traffic convert along the funnel.
• Kissmetrics automatically tracks which devices visitors are using. Marketers can use the data to see how the groups of people coming from computers, smartphones, and tablets convert at each step in the funnel.
• Marketers will learn where there are drop-offs (if any) and how well each type of device converts.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.