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What is Multi-Touch Attribution ? (And How To Get Started)
2 février 2023, par Erin — Analytics TipsGood marketing thrives on data. Or more precisely — its interpretation. Using modern analytics software, we can determine which marketing actions steer prospects towards the desired action (a conversion event).
An attribution model in marketing is a set of rules that determine how various marketing tactics and channels impact the visitor’s progress towards a conversion.
Yet, as customer journeys become more complicated and involve multiple “touches”, standard marketing reports no longer tell the full picture.
That’s when multi-touch attribution analysis comes to the fore.
What is Multi-Touch Attribution?
Multi-touch attribution (also known as multi-channel attribution or cross-channel attribution) measures the impact of all touchpoints on the consumer journey on conversion.
Unlike single-touch reporting, multi-touch attribution models give credit to each marketing element — a social media ad, an on-site banner, an email link click, etc. By seeing impacts from every touchpoint and channel, marketers can avoid false assumptions or subpar budget allocations.
To better understand the concept, let’s interpret the same customer journey using a standard single-touch report vs a multi-touch attribution model.
Picture this: Jammie is shopping around for a privacy-centred web analytics solution. She saw a recommendation on Twitter and ended up on the Matomo website. After browsing a few product pages and checking comparisons with other web analytics tools, she signs up for a webinar. One week after attending, Jammie is convinced that Matomo is the right tool for her business and goes directly to the Matomo website a starts a free trial.
- A standard single-touch report would attribute 100% of the conversion to direct traffic, which doesn’t give an accurate view of the multiple touchpoints that led Jammie to start a free trial.
- A multi-channel attribution report would showcase all the channels involved in the free trial conversion — social media, website content, the webinar, and then the direct traffic source.
In other words: Multi-touch attribution helps you understand how prospects move through the sales funnel and which elements tinder them towards the desired outcome.
Types of Attribution Models
As marketers, we know that multiple factors play into a conversion — channel type, timing, user’s stage on the buyer journey and so on. Various attribution models exist to reflect this variability.
First Interaction attribution model (otherwise known as first touch) gives all credit for the conversion to the first channel (for example — a referral link) and doesn’t report on all the other interactions a user had with your company (e.g., clicked a newsletter link, engaged with a landing page, or browsed the blog campaign).
First-touch helps optimise the top of your funnel and establish which channels bring the best leads. However, it doesn’t offer any insight into other factors that persuaded a user to convert.
Last Interaction attribution model (also known as last touch) allocates 100% credit to the last channel before conversion — be it direct traffic, paid ad, or an internal product page.
The data is useful for optimising the bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFU) elements. But you have no visibility into assisted conversions — interactions a user had prior to conversion.
Last Non-Direct attribution model model excludes direct traffic and assigns 100% credit for a conversion to the last channel a user interacted with before converting. For instance, a social media post will receive 100% of credit if a shopper buys a product three days later.
This model is more telling about the other channels, involved in the sales process. Yet, you’re seeing only one step backwards, which may not be sufficient for companies with longer sales cycles.
Linear attribution model distributes an equal credit for a conversion between all tracked touchpoints.
For instance, with a four touchpoint conversion (e.g., an organic visit, then a direct visit, then a social visit, then a visit and conversion from an ad campaign) each touchpoint would receive 25% credit for that single conversion.
This is the simplest multi-channel attribution modelling technique many tools support. The nuance is that linear models don’t reflect the true impact of various events. After all, a paid ad that introduced your brand to the shopper and a time-sensitive discount code at the checkout page probably did more than the blog content a shopper browsed in between.
Position Based attribution model allocates a 40% credit to the first and the last touchpoints and then spreads the remaining 20% across the touchpoints between the first and last.
This attribution model comes in handy for optimising conversions across the top and the bottom of the funnel. But it doesn’t provide much insight into the middle, which can skew your decision-making. For instance, you may overlook cases when a shopper landed via a social media post, then was re-engaged via email, and proceeded to checkout after an organic visit. Without email marketing, that sale may not have happened.
Time decay attribution model adjusts the credit, based on the timing of the interactions. Touchpoints that preceded the conversion get the highest score, while the first ones get less weight (e.g., 5%-5%-10%-15%-25%-30%).
This multi-channel attribution model works great for tracking the bottom of the funnel, but it underestimates the impact of brand awareness campaigns or assisted conversions at mid-stage.
Why Use Multi-Touch Attribution Modelling
Multi-touch attribution provides you with the full picture of your funnel. With accurate data across all touchpoints, you can employ targeted conversion rate optimisation (CRO) strategies to maximise the impact of each campaign.
Most marketers and analysts prefer using multi-touch attribution modelling — and for some good reasons.
Issues multi-touch attribution solves
- Funnel visibility. Understand which tactics play an important role at the top, middle and bottom of your funnel, instead of second-guessing what’s working or not.
- Budget allocations. Spend money on channels and tactics that bring a positive return on investment (ROI).
- Assisted conversions. Learn how different elements and touchpoints cumulatively contribute to the ultimate goal — a conversion event — to optimise accordingly.
- Channel segmentation. Determine which assets drive the most qualified and engaged leads to replicate them at scale.
- Campaign benchmarking. Compare how different marketing activities from affiliate marketing to social media perform against the same metrics.
How To Get Started With Multi-Touch Attribution
To make multi-touch attribution part of your analytics setup, follow the next steps:
1. Define Your Marketing Objectives
Multi-touch attribution helps you better understand what led people to convert on your site. But to capture that, you need to first map the standard purchase journeys, which include a series of touchpoints — instances, when a prospect forms an opinion about your business.
Touchpoints include:
- On-site interactions (e.g., reading a blog post, browsing product pages, using an on-site calculator, etc.)
- Off-site interactions (e.g., reading a review, clicking a social media link, interacting with an ad, etc.)
Combined these interactions make up your sales funnel — a designated path you’ve set up to lead people toward the desired action (aka a conversion).
Depending on your business model, you can count any of the following as a conversion:
- Purchase
- Account registration
- Free trial request
- Contact form submission
- Online reservation
- Demo call request
- Newsletter subscription
So your first task is to create a set of conversion objectives for your business and add them as Goals or Conversions in your web analytics solution. Then brainstorm how various touchpoints contribute to these objectives.
Web analytics tools with multi-channel attribution, like Matomo, allow you to obtain an extra dimension of data on touchpoints via Tracked Events. Using Event Tracking, you can analyse how many people started doing a desired action (e.g., typing details into the form) but never completed the task. This way you can quickly identify “leaking” touchpoints in your funnel and fix them.
2. Select an Attribution Model
Multi-attribution models have inherent tradeoffs. Linear attribution model doesn’t always represent the role and importance of each channel. Position-based attribution model emphasises the role of the last and first channel while diminishing the importance of assisted conversions. Time-decay model, on the contrary, downplays the role awareness-related campaigns played.
To select the right attribution model for your business consider your objectives. Is it more important for you to understand your best top of funnel channels to optimise customer acquisition costs (CAC)? Or would you rather maximise your on-site conversion rates?
Your industry and the average cycle length should also guide your choice. Position-based models can work best for eCommerce and SaaS businesses where both CAC and on-site conversion rates play an important role. Manufacturing companies or educational services providers, on the contrary, will benefit more from a time-decay model as it better represents the lengthy sales cycles.
3. Collect and Organise Data From All Touchpoints
Multi-touch attribution models are based on available funnel data. So to get started, you will need to determine which data sources you have and how to best leverage them for attribution modelling.
Types of data you should collect:
- General web analytics data: Insights on visitors’ on-site actions — visited pages, clicked links, form submissions and more.
- Goals (Conversions): Reports on successful conversions across different types of assets.
- Behavioural user data: Some tools also offer advanced features such as heatmaps, session recording and A/B tests. These too provide ample data into user behaviours, which you can use to map and optimise various touchpoints.
You can also implement extra tracking, for instance for contact form submissions, live chat contacts or email marketing campaigns to identify repeat users in your system. Just remember to stay on the good side of data protection laws and respect your visitors’ privacy.
Separately, you can obtain top-of-the-funnel data by analysing referral traffic sources (channel, campaign type, used keyword, etc). A Tag Manager comes in handy as it allows you to zoom in on particular assets (e.g., a newsletter, an affiliate, a social campaign, etc).
Combined, these data points can be parsed by an app, supporting multi-touch attribution (or a custom algorithm) and reported back to you as specific findings.
Sounds easy, right? Well, the devil is in the details. Getting ample, accurate data for multi-touch attribution modelling isn’t easy.
Marketing analytics has an accuracy problem, mainly for two reasons:
- Cookie consent banner rejection
- Data sampling application
Please note that we are not able to provide legal advice, so it’s important that you consult with your own DPO to ensure compliance with all relevant laws and regulations.
If you’re collecting web analytics in the EU, you know that showing a cookie consent banner is a GDPR must-do. But many consumers don’t often rush to accept cookie consent banners. The average consent rate for cookies in 2021 stood at 54% in Italy, 45% in France, and 44% in Germany. The consent rates are likely lower in 2023, as Google was forced to roll out a “reject all” button for cookie tracking in Europe, while privacy organisations lodge complaints against individual businesses for deceptive banners.
For marketers, cookie rejection means substantial gaps in analytics data. The good news is that you can fill in those gaps by using a privacy-centred web analytics tool like Matomo.
Matomo takes extra safeguards to protect user privacy and supports fully cookieless tracking. Because of that, Matomo is legally exempt from tracking consent in France. Plus, you can configure to use our analytics tool without consent banners in other markets outside of Germany and the UK. This way you get to retain the data you need for audience modelling without breaching any privacy regulations.
Data sampling application partially stems from the above. When a web analytics or multi-channel attribution tool cannot secure first-hand data, the “guessing game” begins. Google Analytics, as well as other tools, often rely on synthetic AI-generated data to fill in the reporting gaps. Respectively, your multi-attribution model doesn’t depict the real state of affairs. Instead, it shows AI-produced guesstimates of what transpired whenever not enough real-world evidence is available.
4. Evaluate and Select an Attribution Tool
Google Analytics (GA) offers several multi-touch attribution models for free (linear, time-decay and position-based). The disadvantage of GA multi-touch attribution is its lower accuracy due to cookie rejection and data sampling application.
At the same time, you cannot create custom credit allocations for the proposed models, unless you have the paid version of GA, Google Analytics 360. This version of GA comes with a custom Attribution Modeling Tool (AMT). The price tag, however, starts at USD $50,000 per year.
Matomo Cloud offers multi-channel conversion attribution as a feature and it is available as a plug-in on the marketplace for Matomo On-Premise. We support linear, position-based, first-interaction, last-interaction, last non-direct and time-decay modelling, based fully on first-hand data. You also get more precise insights because cookie consent isn’t an issue with us.
Most multi-channel attribution tools, like Google Analytics and Matomo, provide out-of-the-box multi-touch attribution models. But other tools, like Matomo On-Premise, also provide full access to raw data so you can develop your own multi-touch attribution models and do custom attribution analysis. The ability to create custom attribution analysis is particularly beneficial for data analysts or organisations with complex and unique buyer journeys.
Conclusion
Ultimately, multi-channel attribution gives marketers greater visibility into the customer journey. By analysing multiple touchpoints, you can establish how various marketing efforts contribute to conversions. Then use this information to inform your promotional strategy, budget allocations and CRO efforts.
The key to benefiting the most from multi-touch attribution is accurate data. If your analytics solution isn’t telling you the full story, your multi-touch model won’t either.
Collect accurate visitor data for multi-touch attribution modelling with Matomo. Start your free 21-day trial now.
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Matomo’s privacy-friendly web analytics software named best of the year 2022
25 janvier 2023, par ErinW3Tech names Matomo ‘Traffic Analysis Tool of the Year 2022’ in its Web Technologies of the Year list of technologies that gained the most sites
Matomo, a world-leading open-source web analytics platform, is proud to announce that it has received W3Tech’s award for the best web analytics software in its Web Technologies of the Year 2022. Matomo is the first independent, open-source tool named Traffic Analysis Tool of the Year – with previous winners including Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel.
W3Tech, a trusted source for web technology research, determines winners for its annual Web Technologies of the Year list by technologies that gained the most websites. W3Tech surveys usage across millions of websites globally – comparing the number of sites using a technology on January 1st of one year with the number of sites using it the following year.
W3Tech commenting on the Traffic Analysis Tool winners, said: “Matomo, the privacy-focused open source analytics platform, is the traffic analysis tool of the year for the first time, while Google Analytics and the other previous winners all lost a bit of market share in 2022. The Chinese Baidu Analytics ranks second this year. Snowplow, another open source tool, is an unexpected third.”
Matomo launched in 2007 as an open-source analytics alternative to Google Analytics, keeps businesses GDPR and CCPA-compliant. Matomo is trusted by over 1.4 million websites in 220 countries and is translated into over 50 languages.
Matomo founder Matthieu Aubry says, “As the first independent, open-source traffic analysis tool to receive this recognition, Matomo is humbled and honoured to lead the charge for change. It’s a testament to the hard work of our community, and it’s a clear sign that consumers and organisations are looking for ethical alternatives.
“This recognition is a major win for the entire privacy movement and proves that the tide is turning against the big tech players who I believe have long prioritised profits over privacy. We are committed to continuing our work towards a more private and secure digital landscape for all.”
In W3Tech’s Web Technologies of the Year 2022, Matomo was also judged third Tag Manager, behind Google Tag Manager and Adobe DTM.
Matomo helps businesses and organisations track and optimise their online presence allowing users to easily collect, analyse, and act on their website and marketing data to gain a deeper understanding of their visitors and drive conversions and revenue. With 100% data ownership, customers using the company’s tools get the power to protect their website user’s privacy – and where their data is stored and what’s happening to it, without external influence. Furthermore, as the data is not sampled, it maintains data accuracy.
Aubry says its recent award is a positive reminder of how well this solution is performing internationally and is a testament to the exceptional quality and performance of Matomo’s powerful web analytics tools that respect a user’s privacy.
“In 2020, the CJEU ruled US cloud servers don’t comply with GDPR. Then in 2022, the Austrian Data Protection Authority and French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) ruled that the use of Google Analytics is illegal due to data transfers to the US. With Matomo Cloud, the customer’s data is stored in Europe, and no data is transferred to the US. On the other hand, with Matomo On-Premise, the data is stored in your country of choice.
“Matomo has also become one of the most popular open-source alternatives to Google Analytics for website owners and marketing teams because it empowers web professionals to make business decisions. Website investment, collateral, and arrangement are enriched by having the full picture and control of the data.”
About Matomo
Matomo is a world-leading open-source web analytics platform, trusted by over 1.4 million websites in 220 countries and translated into over 50 languages. Matomo helps businesses and organisations track and optimise their online presence allowing users to easily collect, analyse, and act on their website and marketing data to gain a deeper understanding of their visitors and drive conversions and revenue. Matomo’s vision is to create, as a community, the leading open digital analytics platform that gives every user complete control of their data.
For more information/ press enquiries Press – Matomo
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Is Google Analytics Accurate ? 6 Important Caveats
8 novembre 2022, par ErinIt’s no secret that accurate website analytics is crucial for growing your online business — and Google Analytics is often the go-to source for insights.
But is Google Analytics data accurate? Can you fully trust the provided numbers? Here’s a detailed explainer.
How Accurate is Google Analytics? A Data-Backed Answer
When properly configured, Google Analytics (Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4) is moderately accurate for global traffic collection. That said: Google Analytics doesn’t accurately report European traffic.
According to GDPR provisions, sites using GA products must display a cookie consent banner. This consent is required to collect third-party cookies — a tracking mechanism for identifying users across web properties.
Google Analytics (GA) cannot process data about the user’s visit if they rejected cookies. In such cases, your analytics reports will be incomplete.
Cookie rejection refers to visitors declining or blocking cookies from ever being collected by a specific website (or within their browser). It immediately affects the accuracy of all metrics in Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is not accurate in locations where cookie consent to tracking is legally required. Most consumers don’t like disruptive cookie banners or harbour concerns about their privacy — and chose to reject tracking.
This leaves businesses with incomplete data, which, in turn, results in:
- Lower traffic counts as you’re not collecting 100% of the visitor data.
- Loss of website optimisation capabilities. You can’t make data-backed decisions due to inconsistent reporting
For the above reasons, many companies now consider cookieless website tracking apps that don’t require consent screen displays.
Why is Google Analytics Not Accurate? 6 Causes and Solutions
A high rejection rate of cookie banners is the main reason for inaccurate Google Analytics reporting. In addition, your account settings can also hinder Google Analytics’ accuracy.
If your analytics data looks wonky, check for these six Google Analytics accuracy problems.
You Need to Secure Consent to Cookies Collection
To be GDPR-compliant, you must display a cookie consent screen to all European users. Likewise, other jurisdictions and industries require similar measures for user data collection.
This is a nuisance for many businesses since cookie rejection undermines their remarketing capabilities. Hence, some try to maximise cookie acceptance rates with dark patterns. For example: hide the option to decline tracking or make the texts too small.
Banner on the left doesn’t provide an evident option to reject all cookies and nudges the user to accept tracking. Banner on the right does a better job explaining the purpose of data collection and offers a straightforward yes/no selection Sadly, not everyone’s treating users with respect. A joint study by German and American researchers found that only 11% of US websites (from a sample of 5,000+) use GDPR-compliant cookie banners.
As a result, many users aren’t aware of the background data collection to which they have (or have not) given consent. Another analysis of 200,000 cookies discovered that 70% of third-party marketing cookies transfer user data outside of the EU — a practice in breach of GDPR.
Naturally, data regulators and activities are after this issue. In April 2022, Google was pressured to introduce a ‘reject all’ cookies button to all of its products (a €150 million compliance fine likely helped with that). Whereas, noyb has lodged over 220 complaints against individual websites with deceptive cookie consent banners.
The takeaway? Messing up with the cookie consent mechanism can get you in legal trouble. Don’t use sneaky banners as there are better ways to collect website traffic statistics.
Solution: Try Matomo GDPR-Friendly Analytics
Fill in the gaps in your traffic analytics with Matomo – a fully GDPR-compliant product that doesn’t rely on third-party cookies for tracking web visitors. Because of how it is designed, the French data protection authority (CNIL) confirmed that Matomo can be used to collect data without tracking consent.
With Matomo, you can track website users without asking for cookie consent. And when you do, we supply you with a compact, compliant, non-disruptive cookie banner design.
Your Google Tag Isn’t Embedded Correctly
Google Tag (gtag.js) is a web tracking script that sends data to your Google Analytics, Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform.
A corrupted gtag.js installation can create two accuracy issues:
- Duplicate page tracking
- Missing script installation
Is there a way to tell if you’re affected?
Yes. You may have duplicate scripts installed if you have a very low bounce rate on most website pages (below 15% – 20%). The above can happen if you’re using a WordPress GA plugin and additionally embed gtag.js straight in your website code.
A tell-tale sign of a missing script on some pages is low/no traffic stats. Google alerts you about this with a banner:
Solution: Use Available Troubleshooting Tools
Use Google Analytics Debugger extension to analyse pages with low bounce rates. Use the search bar to locate duplicate code-tracking elements.
Alternatively, you can use Google Tag Assistant for diagnosing snippet install and troubleshooting issues on individual pages.
If the above didn’t work, re-install your analytics script.
Machine Learning and Blended Data Are Applied
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) relies a lot on machine learning and algorithmic predictions.
By applying Google’s advanced machine learning models, the new Analytics can automatically alert you to significant trends in your data. [...] For example, it calculates churn probability so you can more efficiently invest in retaining customers.
On the surface, the above sounds exciting. In practice, Google’s application of predictive algorithms means you’re not seeing actual data.
To offer a variation of cookieless tracking, Google algorithms close the gaps in reporting by creating models (i.e., data-backed predictions) instead of reporting on actual user behaviours. Therefore, your GA4 numbers may not be accurate.
For bigger web properties (think websites with 1+ million users), Google also relies on data sampling — a practice of extrapolating data analytics, based on a data subset, rather than the entire dataset. Once again, this can lead to inconsistencies in reporting with some numbers (e.g., average conversion rates) being inflated or downplayed.
Solution: Try an Alternative Website Analytics App
Unlike GA4, Matomo reports consist of 100% unsampled data. All the aggregated reporting you see is based on real user data (not guesstimation).
Moreover, you can migrate from Universal Analytics (UA) to Matomo without losing access to your historical records. GA4 doesn’t yet have any backward compatibility.
Spam and Bot Traffic Isn’t Filtered Out
Surprise! 42% of all Internet traffic is generated by bots, of which 27.7% are bad ones.
Good bots (aka crawlers) do essential web “housekeeping” tasks like indexing web pages. Bad bots distribute malware, spam contact forms, hack user accounts and do other nasty stuff.
A lot of such spam bots are designed specifically for web analytics apps. The goal? Flood your dashboard with bogus data in hopes of getting some return action from your side.
Types of Google Analytics Spam:
- Referral spam. Spambots hijack the referrer, displayed in your GA referral traffic report to indicate a page visit from some random website (which didn’t actually occur).
- Event spam. Bots generate fake events with free language entries enticing you to visit their website.
- Ghost traffic spam. Malicious parties can also inject fake pageviews, containing URLs that they want you to click.
Obviously, such spammy entities distort the real website analytics numbers.
Solution: Set Up Bot/Spam Filters
Google Analytics 4 has automatic filtering of bot traffic enabled for all tracked Web and App properties.
But if you’re using Universal Analytics, you’ll have to manually configure spam filtering. First, create a new view and then set up a custom filter. Program it to exclude:
- Filter Field: Request URI
- Filter Pattern: Bot traffic URL
Once you’ve configured everything, validate the results using Verify this filter feature. Then repeat the process for other fishy URLs, hostnames and IP addresses.
You Don’t Filter Internal Traffic
Your team(s) spend a lot of time on your website — and their sporadic behaviours can impair your traffic counts and other website metrics.
To keep your data “employee-free”, exclude traffic from:
- Your corporate IPs addresses
- Known personal IPs of employees (for remote workers)
If you also have a separate stage version of your website, you should also filter out all traffic coming from it. Your developers, contractors and marketing people spend a lot of time fiddling with your website. This can cause a big discrepancy in average time on page and engagement rates.
Solution: Set Internal Traffic Filters
Google provides instructions for excluding internal traffic from your reports using IPv4/IPv6 address filters.
Session Timeouts After 30 Minutes
After 30 minutes of inactivity, Google Analytics tracking sessions start over. Inactivity means no recorded interaction hits during this time.
Session timeouts can be a problem for some websites as users often pin a tab to check it back later. Because of this, you can count the same user twice or more — and this leads to skewed reporting.
Solution: Programme Custom Timeout Sessions
You can codify custom cookie timeout sessions with the following code snippets:
- _setSessionCookieTimeout. Set a custom new session cookie timeout in milliseconds.
- _setVisitorCookieTimeout. Sets a custom Google Analytics visitor cookie expiration time frame in milliseconds.
Final Thoughts
Thanks to its scale and longevity, Google Analytics has some strong sides, but its data accuracy isn’t 100% perfect.
The inability to capture analytics data from users who don’t consent to cookie tracking and data sampling applied to bigger web properties may be a deal-breaker for your business.
If that’s the case, try Matomo — a GDPR-compliant, accurate web analytics solution. Start your 21-day free trial now. No credit card required.
21 day free trial. No credit card required.
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10 Matomo Features You Possibly Didn’t Know About
28 octobre 2022, par ErinMost users know Matomo as the privacy-focussed web analytics tool with data accuracy, superior to Google Analytics.
And we’re thrilled to be that — and more!
At Matomo, our underlying product vision is to provide a full stack of accurate, user-friendly and privacy-mindful online marketing tools.
Over the years, we’ve expanded beyond baseline website statistics. Matomo Cloud users also get to benefit from additional powerful tools for audience segmentation, conversion optimisation, advanced event tracking and more.
Here are the top 10 advanced Matomo features you wish you knew about earlier (but won’t stop using now!).
Funnels
At first glance, most customer journeys look sporadic. But every marketer will tell you that there is a method to almost every users’ madness. Or more precisely — there’s a method you can use to guide users towards conversions.
That’s called a customer journey — a schematic set of steps and actions people complete from developing awareness and interest in your solution to consideration and finally conversion.
On average, 8 touchpoints are required to turn a prospect into a customer. Though the number can be significantly bigger in B2B sales and smaller for B2C Ecommerce websites.
With the Funnels feature, you can first map all the on-site touchpoints (desired actions) for different types of customers. Then examine the results you’re getting as prospects move through these checkbox steps.
Funnel reports provide:
- High-level metrics such as “Funnel conversion rate”, “Number of funnel conversions”, “Number of funnel entries”.
- Drilled-down reports for each funnel and each tracked action within it. This way you can track the success rates of each step and estimate their contribution to the cumulative effect.
Segmented funnel reports for specific user cohorts (with Matomo Segmentation enabled).
What makes funnels so fun (pun intended)? The variety of use cases and configurations!
You can build funnels to track conversion rates for:
- Newsletter subscriptions
- Job board applications
- Checkout or payment
- Product landing pages
- Seasonal promo campaigns
…. And pretty much any other page where users must complete a meaningful action. So go test this out.
Form Analytics
On-site forms are a 101 tactic for lead generation. For most service businesses, a “contact request” or a “booking inquiry” submission means a new lead in your pipeline.
That said: the average on-site form conversion rates across industries stand at below 50%:
- Property – 37%
- Telecoms – 40%
- Software — 46.83%
That’s not bad, but it could be better. If only you could figure out why people abandon your forms….
Oh wait, Matomo Form Analytics can supply you with answers. Form Analytics provide real-time information on key form metrics — total views, starter rate, submitter rate, conversions and more.
Separately the average form hesitation time is also provided (in other words, the time a user contemplates if filling in a form is worth the effort). Plus, Matomo also tracks the time spent on form submission.
You can review:
- Top drop-off fields – to understand where you are losing prospects. These fields should either be removed or simplified (e.g., with a dropdown menu) to increase conversions.
- Most corrected-field – this will provide a clear indication of where your prospects are struggling with a form. Providing help text can simplify the process and increase conversions.
- Unesserary fields – with this metric, you’ll know which optional fields your leads aren’t interested in filling in and can remove them to help drive conversions.
With Form Analytics, you’ll be able to boost conversions and create a better on-site experience with accurate user data.
A/B testing
Marketing is both an art and a science. A/B testing (or split testing) helps you statistically verify which creative ideas perform better.
A good conversion rate optimisation (CRO) practice is to test different elements and to do so often to find your top contenders.
What can you split test? Loads of things:
- Page slogans and call-to-actions
- Button or submission form placements
- Different landing page designs and layouts
- Seasonal promo offers and banners
- Pricing information
- Customer testimonial placements
More times than not, those small changes in page design or copy can lead to a double-digit lift in conversion rates. Accounting software Sage saw a 30% traffic boost after changing the homepage layout, copy and CTAs based on split test data. Depositphotos, in turn, got a 9.32% increase in account registration rate (CR) after testing a timed pop-up registration form.
The wrinkle? A/B testing software isn’t exactly affordable, with tools averaging $119 – $1,995 per month. Plus, you then have to integrate a third-party tool with your website analytics for proper attribution — and this can get messy.
Matomo saves you the hassle in both cases. An A/B testing tool is part of your Cloud subscription and plays nicely with other features — goal tracking, heatmaps, historic visitor profiles and more.
You can run split tests with Matomo on your websites or mobile apps — and find out if version A, B, C or D is the top performer.
Advertising Conversion Exports
A well-executed search marketing or banner remarketing campaign can drive heaps of traffic to your website. But the big question is: How much of it will convert?
The AdTech industry has a major problem with proper attribution and, because of it, with ad fraud.
Globally, digital ad fraud will cost advertisers a hefty $8 billion by the end of 2022. That’s when another $74 million in ad budgets get wasted per quarter.
The reasons for ad budget waste may vary, but they often have a common denominator: lack of reliable conversion tracking data.
Matomo helps you get a better sense of how you spend your cents with Advertising Conversion Reports. Unlike other MarTech analytics tools, you don’t need to embed any third-party advertising network trackers into your website or compromise user privacy.
Instead, you can easily export accurate conversion data from Matomo (either manually via a CSV file or automated with an HTTPS link) into your Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising or Yandex Ads for cross-validation. This way you can get an objective view of the performance of different campaigns and optimise your budget allocations accordingly.
Find out more about tracking ad campaigns with Matomo.
Matomo Tag Manager
The marketing technology landscape is close to crossing 10,000 different solutions. Cross-platform advertising trackers and all sorts of customer data management tools comprise the bulk of that growing stack.
Remember: Each new tool embed adds extra “weight” to your web page. More tracking scripts equal slower page loading speed — and more frustration for your users. Likewise, extra embeds often means dialling up the developer (which takes time). Or tinkering with the site code yourself (which can result in errors and still raise the need to call a developer).
With Tag Manager, you can easily generate tags for:
- Custom analytics reports
- Newsletter signups
- Affiliates
- Form submission tracking
- Exit popups and surveys
- Ads and more
With Matomo Tag Manager, you can monitor, update or delete everything from one convenient interface. Finally, you can programme custom triggers — conditions when the tag gets activated — and specify data points (variables) it should collect. The latter is a great choice for staying privacy-focused and excluding any sensitive user information from processing.
With our tag management system (TMS), no rogue tags will mess up your analytics or conversion tracking.
Session recordings
User experience (UX) plays a pivotal role in your conversion rates.
A five-year McKinsey study of 300 publicly listed companies found that companies with strong design practices have 32 percentage points higher revenue growth than their peers.
But what makes up a great website design and browsing experience? Veteran UX designers name seven qualities:
Source: Semantic Studios To figure out if your website meets all these criteria, you can use Session Recording — a tool for recording how users interact with your website.
By observing clicks, mouse moves, scrolls and form interactions you can determine problematic website design areas such as poor header navigation, subpar button placements or “boring” blocks of text.
Such observational studies are a huge part of the UX research process because they provide unbiased data on interaction. Or as Nielsen Norman Group puts it:
“The way to get user data boils down to the basic rules of usability:
- Watch what people actually do.
- Do not believe what people say they do.
- Definitely don’t believe what people predict they may do in the future.”
Most user behaviour analytics tools sell such functionality for a fee. With Matomo Cloud, this feature is included in your subscription.
Heatmaps
While Session Replays provide qualitative insights, Heatmaps supply you with first-hand qualitative insights. Instead of individual user browsing sessions, you get consolidated data on where they click and how they scroll through your website.
Heatmaps are another favourite among UX designers and their CRO peers because you can:
- Validate earlier design decisions around information architecture, page layout, button placements and so on.
- Develop new design hypotheses based on stats and then translate them into website design improvements.
- Identify distractive no-click elements that confuse users and remove them to improve conversions.
- Locate problematic user interface (UI) areas on specific devices or operating systems and improve them for a seamless experience.
To get even more granular results, you can apply up to 100 Matomo segments to drill down on specific user groups, geographies or devices.
This way you can make data-based decisions for A/B testing, updating or redesigning your website pages.
Custom Alerts
When it comes to your website, you don’t want to miss anything big — be it your biggest sales day or a sudden nosedive in traffic.
That’s when Custom Alerts come in handy.
With a few clicks, you can set up email or text-based alerts about important website metrics. Once you hit that metric, Matomo will send a ping.
You can also set different types of Custom Alerts for your teams. For example, your website administrator can get alerted about critical technical performance issues such as a sudden spike in traffic. It can indicate a DDoS attack (in the worst case) — and timely resolution is crucial here. Or suggest that your website is going viral and you might need to provision extra computing resources to ensure optimal site performance.
Your sales team, in turn, can get alerted about new form submissions, so that they can quickly move on to lead scoring and subsequent follow-ups.
Use cases are plentiful with this feature.
Custom Dashboards and Reports
Did you know you can get a personalised view of the main Matomo dashboards?
By design, we made different website stats available as separate widgets. Hence, you can cherry-pick which stats get a prominent spot. Moreover, you can create and embed custom widgets into your Matomo dashboard to display third-party insights (e.g., POS data).
Set up custom dashboard views for different teams, business stakeholders or clients to keep them in the loop on relevant website metrics.
Custom Reports feature, in turn, lets you slice and dice your traffic analytics the way you please. You can combine up to three different data dimensions per report and then add any number of supported metrics to get a personalised analytics report.
For example, to zoom in on your website performance in a specific target market you can apply “location” (e.g., Germany) and “action type” (e.g., app downloads) dimensions and then get segmented data on metrics such as total visits, conversion rates, revenue and more.
Get to know even more ways to customise Matomo deployment.
Roll Up Report
Need to get aggregated traffic analytics from multiple web properties, but not ready to pay $150K per year for Google Analytics 360 for that?
We’ve got you with Roll-Up Reporting. You can get a 360-degree view into important KPIs like global revenue, conversion rates or form performance across multiple websites, online stores, mobile apps and even Intranet properties.
Setting up this feature takes minutes, but saves you hours on manually exporting and cross-mapping data from different web analytics tools.
Channel all those saved hours into more productive things like increasing your conversion rates or boosting user engagement.
Avoid Marketing Tool Sprawl with Matomo
With Matomo as your website analytics and conversion optimisation app, you don’t need to switch between different systems, interfaces or have multiple tracking codes embedded on your site.
And you don’t need to cultivate a disparate (and expensive!) MarTech tool stack — and then figure out if each of your tools is compliant with global privacy laws.
All the tools you need are conveniently housed under one roof.
Want to learn more about Matomo features? Check out product training videos next!
21 day free trial. No credit card required.
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Homepage Design : Best Practices & Examples
5 octobre 2022, par ErinDid you know users spend about 50 milliseconds deciding if they like your website’s homepage design or not?
With billions of websites and scrolling often done on the go, you have to make a strong first impression because the chances for a once-over are slim.
Learn how to design magnetically-appealing website homepages from this guide.
What is a homepage in web design?
Homepage is the front page of your website — a destination where users land when typing your website URL address. It’s located at the root of the website’s domain (e.g., matomo.org) or a subdomain (e.g., university.webflow.com).
Design-wise a homepage has two goals:
- Explain the purpose of the website and present overview information
- Provide top-level navigation to lower-level web pages (e.g., blog, sales pages, etc.)
Separately, a homepage is also the place where users will return each time they’ll feel stuck and want to start anew. Thus, your homepage website design should provide obvious navigation paths to other website areas.
6 Must-Know Website Homepage Design Best Practices
Behind every winning homepage design stands a detailed customer journey map.
A customer journey is a schematic representation of how site visitors will move around your website to accomplish various goals.
A good customer journey map lists different actions a user will take after landing on your website (e.g., browse product pages, save items to a wishlist, register an account, etc.) — and it does so for different audience segments.
Source: Nielsen Norman Group Your homepage design should help users move from the first step on their journey (e.g., learning about your website) to the final one (e.g., converting to a paid customer). At the same time, your homepage should serve the needs of both new and returning visitors — prospects who may be at a different stage of their journey (e.g., consideration).
With the above in mind, let’s take a look at several website homepage design ideas and the reasons why they work.
1. Use Familiar Design Elements
Whether you’re designing a new website or refreshing an old one, it’s always tempting to go “out of the box” — use horizontal scrolling, skip header navigation or include arty animations.
Bold design choices work for some brands, mainly those who aren’t using their website as a primary sales channel (e.g., luxury brands).
But unfamiliar design patterns can also intimidate a lot of shoppers. In one observational study, people were asked to guess where specific content (e.g., information on international calls) would be placed on a telecom website. 75% of users picked the same location. This means two things:
- People already have expectations of where specific website information is typically placed
- Yet, one in four users struggles to identify the right areas even within standard website layouts
So why make the job harder for them? As UX consultant Peter Ramsey rightfully notes:
The truth is: designing the best experience isn’t about being unique, it’s about being easy. And guess what feels really easy to use? Things that feel familiar.
Therefore, analyse other homepage layout designs in your industry. Pay attention to the number and type of homepage screens and approaches to designing header/footer navigation.
Take some of those ideas as your “base”. Then make your homepage design on-brand with unique typography, icons, visuals and other graphic design elements.
Take a cue from ICAM — a steel manufacturing company. Their niche isn’t typically exciting. Yet, their homepage design stops you in your tracks and tinkers your curiosity to discover more (even if you aren’t shopping for metalware).
The interesting part is that ICAM uses a rather standard homepage layout. You have a hero image in the first screen, followed by a multi-column layout of their industry expertise and an overview of manufacturers.
But this homepage design feels fresh because the company uses plenty of white space, bold typography and vibrant visuals. Also, they delay the creative twist (horizontal scrolling area) to the bottom of the homepage, meaning that it’s less likely to intimidate less confident web users.
2. Decide On The Optimal Homepage Layout
In web design, a homepage layout is your approach to visually organising different information on the screen.
Observant folks will notice that good homepage designs often have the same layout. For example, include a split-view “hero” screen with a call to action on the left and visuals (photo or video) on the left.
SOURCE: shopify.com / SOURCE: squareup.com The reason for using similar layouts for website homepage design isn’t a lack of creativity. On the contrary, some layouts have become the “best practice” because they:
- Offer a great user experience (UX) and don’t confuse first-time visitors
- Feel familiar and create a pleasurable sense of deja-vu among users
- Have proven to drive higher conversion rates through benchmarks and tests
Popular types of website homepage layouts:
- Single column – a classic option of presenting main content in a single, vertical column. Good choice for blogs, personal websites and simple corporate sites.
- Split screen layout divides the page in two equal areas with different information present. Works best for Ecommerce homepages (e.g., to separate different types of garments) or SaaS websites, offering two product types (e.g., a free personal product version and a business edition).
- Asymmetrical layout assumes dividing your homepage into areas of different size and styles. Asymmetry helps create specific focal points for users to draw their attention to the most prominent information.
- Grid of cards layout helps present a lot of information in a more digestible manner by breaking down bigger bulks of text into smaller cards — a graphic element, featuring an image and some texts. By tapping a card, users can then access extra content.
- Boxes are visually similar to cards, but can be of varying shape. For example, you can have a bigger header-width box area, followed by four smaller boxes within it. Both of these website layouts work well for Ecommerce.
- Featured image layout gives visuals (photos and videos) the most prominent placement on the homepage, with texts and other graphic design elements serving a secondary purpose.
- F-pattern layout is based on the standard eye movement most people have when reading content on the website. Eye tracking studies found that we usually pay the most attention to information atop of the page (header area), then scan horizontally before dripping down to the next vertical line until we find content that captures our attention.
User behaviour analytics (UBA) tools are the best way to determine what type of layout will work for your homepage.
For example, you can use Matomo Heatmaps and Session Recording to observe how users navigate your homepage, which areas or links they click and what blockers they face during navigation.
Matomo can capture accurate behavioural insights because we track relative positions to elements within your websites. This approach allows us to provide accurate data for users with different browsers, operating systems, zoom-in levels and fonts.
The best part? You can collect behavioural data from up to 100 different user segments to understand how different audience cohorts engage with your product.
3. Include a One-Sentence Tagline
A tagline is a one-line summary of what your company does and what its unique sales proposition (USP) is. It should be short, catchy and distinguish you from competitors.
A modern homepage design practice is to include a call to action in the first screen. Why? Because you then instantly communicate or remind of your value proposition to every user — and provide them with an easy way to convert whenever they are ready to do business with you.
Here’s how three companies with a similar product, a project management app, differentiate themselves through homepage taglines.
Monday.com positions itself as an operating system (OS) for work.
Basecamp emphasises its product simplicity and openly says that they are different from other overly-complex software.
Asana, in turn, addresses a familiar user pain point (siloed communication) that it attempts to fix with its product.
Coming up with the perfect homepage tagline is a big task. You may have plenty of ideas, but little confidence in what version will stick.
The best approach? Let a series of A/B tests decide. You can test a roaster of homepage slogans on a rotating bi-weekly/monthly schedule and track how copy changes affect conversion rates.
With Matomo A/B test feature, you can create, track and manage all experiments straight from your web analytics app — and get consolidated reports on total page visitors and conversion rates per each tested variation.
Beyond slogans, you can also run A/B tests to validate submission form placements, button texts or the entire page layout.
For instance, you can benchmark how your new homepage design performs compared to the old version with a subset of users before making it publicly available.
4. Highlight The Main Tasks For The User
Though casual browsing is a thing, most of us head to specific websites with a clear agenda — find information, compare prices, obtain services, etc.
Thus, your homepage should provide clear starting points for users’ main tasks (those you’ve also identified as conversion goals on your customer journey maps!).
These tasks can include:
- Account registration
- Product demo request
- Newsletter sign-up
The best website homepage designs organically guide users through a set number of common tasks, one screen at a time.
Let’s analyse Sable homepage design. The company offers a no-fee bank account and a credit card product for soon-to-be US transplants. The main task a user has: Decide if they want to try Sable and hopefully open an account with them.
This mono-purpose page focuses on persuading a prospect that Sable is right for them.
The first screen hosts the main CTA with an animated drop-down arrow to keep scrolling. This is likely aimed at first-time visitors that just landed on the page from an online ad or social media post.
The second screen serves the main pitch — no-fee, no-hassle access to a US banking account that also helps you build your credit score.
The third screen encourages users to learn more about Sable Credit — the flagship product. For the sceptics, the fourth screen offers several more reasons to sign up for the credit product.
Then Sable moves on to pitching its second offering — a no-fee debit card with a cashback. Once again, the follow-up screen sweetens the deal by bringing up other perks (higher cashback for popular services like Amazon) and overcoming objections (no SSN required and multi-language support available).
The sequence ends with side-by-side product comparison and some extra social proof.
In Sable’s case, each homepage screen has a clear purpose and is designed to facilitate one specific user action — account opening.
For multi-product companies, the above strategy works great for designing individual landing pages.
5. Design Proper Navigation Paths
All websites have two areas reserved for navigation:
- Header menu
- Footer menu
Designing an effective header menu is more important since it’s the primary tool visitors will use to discover other pages.
Your header menu can be:
- Sticky — always visible as the person keeps scrolling.
- Static — e.g., a hidden drop-down menu.
If you go for a static header and have a longer homepage layout (e.g., 5+ screens), you also need to add extra navigation elements somewhere mid-page. Or else users might not figure out where to go next and merely bounce off.
You can do this by:
- Promoting other areas of your website (e.g., sub-category pages) by linking out to them
- Adding a carousel of “recent posts”, “recommended reads” and “latest products”
- Using buttons and CTAs to direct users towards specific actions (e.g., account registration) or assets (free eBook)
For instance, cosmetics brand Typology doesn’t have a sticky header on the homepage. Instead, they prompt discovery by promoting different product categories (best sellers, bundles, latest arrivals) and their free skin diagnostic quiz — a great engagement mechanism to retain first time users.
Once the user scrolls down to the bottom of the page, they should have an extra set of navigational options — aka footer links.
Again, these help steer the visitor towards discovering more content without scrolling back up to the top of your homepage.
Nielsen Norman Group says that people mostly use footers as:
- A second chance to be convinced — after reading the entire homepage, the user is ready to give your product a go.
- The last resort for hard-to-find content that’s not displayed in global header navigation (e.g., Terms and Conditions or shipping information pages).
As a rule of thumb, you should designate the following information to the footer:
- Utility links (Contact page, Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, etc.)
- Secondary-task links (e.g., Career page, Investor Details, Media contacts, etc.)
- Brands within the organisation (if you operate several)
- Customer engagement link (email newsletters and social media buttons)
The key is to keep the area compact — not more than one standard user screen resolution of 1280×720.
6. Show Users What’s Clickable (Or Not)
A homepage invites your site visitors on a journey. But if they don’t know which elements to click, they aren’t going to get anywhere.
Good homepage design makes it obvious which page elements are clickable, i.e., can take the user to a new page or another segment of the homepage.
Here are several must-know homepage design tips for better on-page navigation:
- Use colour and underline or bold to highlight clickable words. Alternatively, you can change the browser cursor from a standard arrow into another element (e.g., a larger dot or a pointy finger) to indicate when the cursor hovers over a clickable website area.
- Make descriptive button texts that imply what will happen when a user clicks the page. Instead of using abstract and generic button texts like “see more” or “learn more”, try a more vibrant language like “dive in” for clicking through to a spa page.
- Use a unified hover area to show how different homepage design elements represent a single path or multiple navigation paths. When multiple items are encapsulated in one visual element (e.g., a box), users may be reluctant to click the image because they aren’t sure if it’s one large hit area leading to a single page or if there are multiple hit areas, leading to different pages.
Homepage of BEAUSiTE — a whimsical hotel in the Swiss Alps – embodies all of the above design principles. They change the cursor style whenever you scroll into a hit area, use emotive and creative micro-copy for all button texts and clearly distinguish between different homepage elements.
How to Make Your Homepage Design Even More Impactful?
Website homepage design is roughly 20% of pure design work and 80% of behind-the-scenes research.
To design a high-performing homepage you need to have data-backed answers to the following questions:
- Who are your primary and secondary target audiences?
- Which tasks (1 to 4) you’d want to help them solve through your homepage?
You can get the answers to both questions from your web analytics data by using audience segmentation and page transition (behaviour flow) reports in Matomo.
Based on these, you can determine common user journeys and tasks people look to accomplish when visiting your website. Next, you can collect even more data with UBA tools like heatmaps and user session recordings. Then translated the observed patterns into working homepage design ideas.
Improve your homepage design and conversion rates with Matomo. Start your free 21-day trial now!
