Find Information Conversion Rate – The low operational costs metric that matters

This metric (find information conversion rate) probably won’t mean much to most people, however it is not uncommon on retail or customer focused web sites. 

Call centers can cost a lot of money for tasks that a user can complete online and a lot of retail and customer service companies are now working on digital products and optimisation roadmaps in an attempt to digitalise self-service customer tasks and reduce costs.

What is Find Information Conversion Rate?

 The big book of key performance indicators by eric peterson from Neo Consulting is describing in great detail what this metric is about, but if you can’t bother reading the whole chapter, I summarize below a couple of examples of what the metric is and how it should be used.

A lot of web sites hold critical information that can lower operational costs by preventing site visitors from placing a phone calls such as “when is my order going to be delivered“?, “I placed the wrong order online, how can I change it“, etc, since this kind of information can be found online.

HELP microsites, FAQ or other INFO type pages, exist for that reason, however with minimum understanding of digital behaviours this can lead to poor results.

To give you an example, lets assume that we have a Nectar and Waitrose Card customer who both want to change their home address.

Nectar has made sure that Organic traffic will be served with the right information straight from the knowledge graph, while Waitrose rank pages that hold no information and are irrelevant with the search query:

Making sure that visitors find that information is critical because not only you give your customers the information they need at the time they need it but most importantly you lower your call center operation costs.

Find Information Conversion Rate Definition

This KPI is a variation on the order conversion rate in which we simply replace order with critical goal pages.

Number of Visits to your Goal Page / Total Number of Visits to your INFO pages = Information Find Conversion Rate

Now let me give you an example with Sainsbury’s one of the large well known Retailers here in UK.

These goal pages can be the answers to frequently asked questions, knowledge base articles or any kind of page that contains information that your site is designed to provide.

Let’s assume that a number of phone calls is from people who can’t see how many points they have on their Nectar Card.  The goal page for this type of inquiry would be this one http://help.sainsburys.co.uk/help/faqs/nectar/nectar-points-time-to-add 

However if users cant find that page (or if they dont even know it exists) they will simply call in order to find out. This will increase the % of calls for information that are already online, hence a cost that can be easily avoided.

Most web analysts will have to face two major problems with this metric. To first one is that, unless you own Google Analytics Premium or Adobe Omniture you will not be able to set different goals for all your support pages.

However if your site provides cost-saving customer support pages, then try to create a couple of goals based on the most important reasons people call your customer service.

The second problem is that you will need to identify what is the % of users that actually come to your site in order to find information and not purchase/open an account/play with your demo version (depends your product), you name it.

In an ideal world you need two tier segmentation (“who” is on my website and “what” are they trying to achieve) however try to start with your standard segmentation tools to make the calculation only for visitors who are looking at customer support content, ideally per category path (/help) or a subdomain (such as the Sainsbury’s example above).

If the later is the case then you should consider this KPI in tandem with average pageviews per visit to monitor for an artificially high conversion rate, essentially visitors are looking at multiple pages that fall in the solution set and might simply be frustrated. 

Hopefully, because the visiting audience has some baseline of knowledge about your products or services they’ll be efficient in their task of finding help and will convert at a relatively high rate. Any sudden drops should prompt you to ask yourself if something recently changed in your site design, search technology or index, or the quality of products you’re supporting.

Even if yours is not a pure support site, segmenting your support-seeking visitors and making sure they’re being helped is critical. Because retention and customer satisfaction
are tied directly to people being able to find information when problems arise simply and easily, this KPI cannot be undervalued.

How to use the new Google Analytics Calculated Metric to track the Find Information Conversion Rate

Google introduces calculated metrics a year or so ago, and at the moment even free users can have up to 5 calculated metrics.

Firstly go to your goal set up in Google, and set a goal with the page. We will use the example with the Sainsbury’s page above. In the Goal Description select “Destination” as shown below:

Then in the Goal Details, select “Equals to” and then add your “Help” page.

Save and exit the goal set up section, then click on Calculated Metrics, and then “New”.

Add the name of the metric you want, select FLOAT format and then the formula: “Goal X completion” (X being the number of Goal you set up the help page) / Sessions

Click save, then head to your custom reports and in your Metrics list, the name of your calculated metrics should appear.

Add all the other metrics you want to see and your report should be ready.