Array Studio Reading List - a list of useful books

Web App Conversion Funnel August 4, 2006

When you are building a web application you think that you can presume how people will use it and you build it a certain way. You presume that a lot of visitors will signup for free plan or free trial. You presume that people who register will actually login.

Of course these presumptions are often completely wrong. People use your web app in strangest ways. A lot of them, or to be more precise most of them, won’t even consider signing up, even though you offer them a fabulous free plan. Even those who register, you would think that they will actually login at least once, but some of them don’t.

Usually it’s good if 5-10% of your visitors actually signup (if you have higher percentage - you must be doing something right). Also in each step (casual visitor, trial signup, login, paying customer) you will probably lose high percentage of your visitors (in some even up to 90%). So, basically you need a lot of casual visitors to get few paying customers.

The most useful thing you can do is to track how people use your web app and where they usually give up. Vitamin features an excellent article on this subject: “How to measure the success of your web app”. It talks about the conversion funnel which can be used to represent steps through which users go through. You can create a detailed funnel model and use it to track what people are doing and when they are giving up on you app. For example:

If 30 per cent of your visitors are viewing your sign-up page, but only 2 per cent are actually signing up, you’ll want to redesign your sign-up page.

The conclusion is that you should track everything and you should try to fix stuff that is high in the funnel, i.e. the places where you lose most of your visitors. So, if you are building or consider building web app read Vitamin’s article and start tracking everything.