Alrighty, yesterday I left this photo at the bottom of my post, and asked if you recognized it. You might not know the photo, but you probably heard the story.
According to the story, in 1914, an architect named Joseph N. Bradford used a hot air balloon to fly up and over the trails that had been created in the snow by students during the winter. They then used that to build out a network of paved sidewalks.
Desire Paths
These criss-crossy sidewalks are the shortest path from a to b…
Wikipedia — A desire path is an unplanned small trail formed by erosion caused by human or animal traffic. The path usually represents the shortest or the most easily navigated route through a natural area or greenspace, and the width and severity of its surface erosion are often indicators of the quantity of traffic it receives.
Desire paths may go on to become formal trails and even established thoroughfares, such as Broadway in New York City, which some urban planners believe to follow a convenient trail developed by the Wecquaesgeek people, predating American colonization.
(I heard this story years ago, but it wasn’t until today that I heard that NYC’s Broadway was a result of it.)
Desire paths are not only about trampled vegetation. The UX design community uses this example a lot to help new designers wrap their head around the fact that not everyone uses software in the way it was built/intended.
So it naturally came to mind when I started this yesterday. Because of two things:
I wanted to explore using Mouse Whisperer as a user instead of a builder, and that is how desire paths are revealed.
Part of Mouse Whisperer is for evaluating the desire paths on your ecommerce store. It’s actually the first step in the CRO workflow…
I didn’t even make that correlation when building that part of the workflow, so yeah, worked out well.
Let’s look at that now…
Store Snapshots
When you install Mouse Whisperer, you see that we call audits “snapshots.” We use that name because we don’t look back at past data to drum up insights. There is nothing wrong with that, but in my experience over the last 12 years (and esp in the last 1 or 2 years), websites change too fast. So instead of pulling data, we let our mousetracker.js see what your visitors are doing over a short period of time.
Because not only websites change… the market and your competition change too. So this gives you data that is more relevant to right now.
side rant:
It might sound odd coming from someone who works with data… but data doesn’t have to be perfect. We act like it does because its numbers, and numbers relates to math, and math must be exact in order to work.
But you data is not math. It’s a measurement of what people do, and people are not exact. People are nuts and their behavior is unpredictable and that is why we track many people instead of just a few so we are at least close enough to make an informed decision.
And here it is… a Store Snapshot in progress. I set this one to track 2,500 unique human visitors. Because I want to know what real people are doing on the site.
I’m trying to optimize the site, so I only are about the hooooomans. The Zombies you see in that image are people who came to the site but did not engage with anything or click anything. They are not customers in this story.
Some could be accidental clicks. Some could be meta-allowed click fraud. Some could be aliens. I don’t care. They weren’t shopping, and our task at hand is CRO not traffic quality. That’s important, but it’s for a different day.
Anyway, we got over 1600 so far. That is plenty to work with. so let’s get to the good stuff…
Alrighty… we got some numbers.
CVR = 4.5%. Not bad
ATC (add to cart) = 10.6%. That is definitely something. A drop from 10.6 ATC to 4.5 CVR. Work is needed here.
Searches = 21. I need to dig into what those keywords those are. That could be show us something.
These don’t really tell us what to do or where to do it, but they are important to gauge the health of your store and set benchmarks.
This image below, though… we are starting to get to the good shit.
I have it set to show in order of highest to lowest sessions.
The top page by both session count and revenue is the homepage. In general, I would suggest that you focus your CRO efforts on just about all other pages before you start tweaking your homepage.
The next 5 pages on that list better us our purposes. 3 product pages and 2 collections. I like to keep it tight so I don’t get scatter-brained, so I am not going to work on 5 at a time. But I also like variety and ideas tend to bounce around more when I’m juggling more than one at time.
I will go with 3.
And because I am just looking at some high-level numbers for each, I need to know more. So let me go and make 4 clicks to move onto step 3.
I can choose these 3 with the checkboxes, and then click Create Snapshot - which will prompt me for a few settings.
I started the Store Snapshot on Thursday morning early. It’s Friday now. I want this to be done by Monday morning so I can continue on, so I set the target visitor count to 500 for each.
You can also just start a Snapshot for any page at any time by going to that section of the app, but as part of the workflow, we build this into the Store Snapshot phase because… why not. It’s smooth.
So now, this new section appears to let me know that these Snapshot audits are up and running.
That is all for today. On Monday we will dive into the page snapshots… which were the first things we designed in this app. And kind of the whole point.
So that is exciting, but not nearly as exciting as tonight, because I get to go see Blind Pilot… if you haven’t heard of them, here is my favorite song.
Have a great weekend.
- shep