Understanding Intent To Buy

It feels like every blog post I read nowadays is about CRO; some good, some not so good. And no, I’m not talking about birds (that’s “Crow”), nor indeed a chain of Manchester bars (that’s “Kro”) but in fact Conversion Rate Optimisation. I know you knew that already of course, I’m just humouring you.

The majority of these posts can be summarised as follows:

Solicit as much feedback as possible from customers, Speak to your sales staff, Get usability tests from Usertesting.com, Always be testing (but just sensible things, not pointless things), Make sure you test in a statistically valid fashion etc etc

Now, CRO is my bread and butter and I work on or supervise CRO tasks pretty much every day. It’s a vital part of increasing sales and maximising revenue from any e-commerce website. I’ll probably do a post myself at some point on this, but in the mean time I saw this post on SEOmoz recently which I’d thoroughly recommend reading if you’re new to this area.

CRO is great

There’s just 1 little problem with this cosy CRO love fest….. What you change on-site (checkout funnels, landing pages, navigation, banners etc) is not the only factor that contributes to your conversion rate, yet it seems to dominate every post I read about increasing conversion. OK, not much of a shock there for most of you I know, but what if I told you that on-site CRO is actually far from the most significant factor in increasing conversion? A bit more surprised now?

Do you understand Intent To Buy?

In my opinion, intent to buy is the single most important factor that determines whether a visitor to your website converts (assuming your website is already reasonably conversion friendly in an on-site CRO sense), yet it’s one of the most poorly understood factors by people performing conversion rate optimisation. Just to be clear, I’m talking purely about real e-commerce websites here for the entirety of this post, so a conversion equals a sale, nothing less. The concept of intention can be difficult to grasp as it requires you to truly get into the mindset of a customer which isn’t always easy. I don’t think anyone understands this fully (including me) but I’m going to try my best to give you an introduction. Confused? Well, let me visualise it for you…

Potential e-commerce customers can be split into 4 main types:

 The Definites - will convert in this session, baring the complete destruction of  all civilisation

The Probables – likely to convert this session, but might not if they get put off

The Possibles – unlikely to convert this session, but could be persuaded

The No-Way-Joses – simply no chance of converting this session (still important, see later)

Now, if you have a powerful brand and a great reputation, then your intent to buy profile on a normal day probably looks something like this:

You might think the number of definites ought to be higher. Well, remember that definites will buy no matter what you do on-site (even if you make the add to basket button difficult to find, the checkout process more awkward etc); they will find a way to order from you in this session despite all but the worst conversion blockages.

Just to summarise this profile, people know who Amazon are, they trust them as a website and they’re probably searching for “Amazon” in Google to get to the site, because that’s the site they want to buy from. All these things equate to intent.

On the other hand, if you’re a spanking new e-commerce start up with no reputation or brand awareness, your profile is more likely to look like this:

Quite a dramatic difference eh? There is one absolutely vital thing to remember when considering the intent to buy profile of any site you plan to optimise conversions for:

1. Your customer has already effectively decided what type they will be on your site before they land (Huh? No really, they have)

This is something I suspect a lot of people doing conversion rate optimisation will struggle to get their respective heads around. You can only influence the conversion of probables and possibles though on-site CRO. You might think you’re converting no-way-joses with your awesome new checkout funnel, but you ain’t (sorry). The customers you’re converting already had subconsciously set their pre-defined categorisation of intent for your website before they even landed.

This is a tricky area because obviously if you’re split testing something a particular customer really wants to see against not showing it, you might understandably think that you could convert no-way-joses. I would argue that the visitor must have had some intent to purchase in this session on your website how it stands currently (even if they don’t consciously realise it). If they have no intent at all, then nothing you do on-site is going to convert them. These people might be teetering right at the edge of the possibles and almost into the no-way-joses but there must be some intent present in order for your on-site CRO to influence them. 

On-Site Versus Off-Site

The astute of you will have noticed I’ve been referring primarily to on-site CRO. There is an important distinction to make here which I should expand on before I go any further. On-Site CRO covers changes that whoever is in charge of your website can implement. These include altering:

• Banners, Page Layout, Site Structure, Content, Navigation, Functionality, Checkout Process

Sure, you might have to jump through a few hoops and argue with a few people to get these changes, but these are changes the team running the website can make happen. In effect, this often equates to changing the display of information that’s already there.

Off-Site covers changes that the team running the website generally can’t make happen, as they affect too many other areas. These include things like:

• Prices, Delivery Charges, Returns Policy, Stock Availability, Telephone Support Provision

Things like price are obviously key. If for example you shave 90% of your prices, providing you have sufficient trust and awareness that people know your site is not a scam, your intent to buy profile is of course going to change dramatically (for the better of course, conversion wise).

Don’t fall into the trap however of thinking that making off-site changes means your customer hasn’t decided their type (definite/probable/possible/no-way-jose) before they land, because they still have. Consider Bob for example:

If price is important to Bob, then he already knows subconsciously what a good price for him looks like, even before he gets to your site. Of course, if the price only makes him a possible, the fact that you offer free delivery and free returns in conjunction to this might be sufficient to turn him into a probable. There are obviously many, many possible complex combinations of on-site and off-site factors that will work for Bob and enable him to convert as a customer. Unfortunately, there are many more factor combinations that will result in him not purchasing when he visits your site.

The Amazon example

Amazon is a great example of an online website, because their intent to buy profile is very strong. From the last figures I saw, Amazon’s bottom line conversion rate is around 15%.

Now in order to demonstrate the power of intent to buy, I want you to imagine the following. Imagine you set up a brand new web store exactly like Amazon, except with a different company name. You have the same products and the same prices; I’ll even let you keep their huge database of product reviews. In your first week, you receive the same amount of traffic as Amazon and your customers have exactly the same demographic breakdown as customers to Amazon.

The only caveat with this is that you have to get your head around the fact that none of these customers have ever heard of Amazon before, which of course is an impossibility, but just try

Now, the question is this. If Amazon converts these customers at 15%, what will be the bottom line conversion rate for your brand spanking new website?

• A) 15% – it’s the same website
• B) Maybe a bit less as it’s a new site, say between 12%-15%
• C) Less than half as much; under 7.5%

Now, I’m man enough to admit that when I first started understanding CRO, I might well have plumped for option B. I would have been very much mistaken however as the answer, without any shadow of a doubt, is option C. Quite simply, customers visiting Amazon have more intent to buy because they know who Amazon are and they appreciate their brand reputation and trust. On the other hand, your new website might be doing everything right on-site, but as customers haven’t heard of you, the likelihood of purchase will be nowhere near as strong. Were you leaning towards A or B? I’ll let you decide for yourself if you need to think a bit more about how you approach CRO.

How can you measure intent to buy?

Honestly, with some difficulty.  I was recently reminded of an interview from 2009 between Aaron Wall and Ralph “Fantomaster” Tegtmeir where Ralph stated that we are still in the “Stone Age” of search. Now granted, this was over a year ago, but if that’s the case then our current understanding of why customers convert is positively prehistoric.

Trying to define the intentions of a visitor to your website fully based on just referrers and keywords is nigh on impossible. And sorry to say this, but we’re years away from being able to measure what is going on inside someone’s head at such a degree to be able to fully judge intent to buy. However, there are many indications that you can pull out from your analytics package. For example, affiliate traffic from particular price comparison engines might convert well for you, right? They are likely to be arriving on your site with more intent (they already know your price and so on). And of course, certain keyword searches will convert better than others as they indicate more intent as well.

There are some tools out there that can give you an indication of whether a search term generally has commercial intent, but does that automatically mean that a particular term will always indicate intent to buy for visitors to your site? I’d say probably not.

However, perhaps the easiest way to measure if your intent to buy profile is improving is through brand search. Brand search is an immensely powerful indicator of intent to buy. Customers who are searching for your brand are doing so because they want to visit your website. That’s a strong indicator of intent.

Consequently, most e-commerce sites will find that the conversion rate of brand searches is far in excess of the conversion rate for more generic terms. There’s no hard and fast rule, but most small to mid-sized e-commerce sites can convert brand searches at above 10%. Now, when you consider any top e-commerce store like Amazon gets the vast majority of their search traffic through brand terms, it’s not such a leap to see how their overall conversion runs at 15%, is it?

So why bother with on-site CRO?

So you might be wondering, if intent to buy is so important, why should you bother with on-site CRO? Why not just spend your money on building your brand? Well, there are two main reasons:

• On-site CRO is (relatively) easy to implement
• On-site CRO is cheap

Simple eh? Converting some probables and possibles to customers is not that difficult if you understand on-site CRO. And even if you want to take it a step further, you can hire literally the best on-site CRO experts in the world (such as Bryan Eisenberg or Tim Ash, both guys I’ve had the pleasure of seeing speak) for far, far less than it would cost to build awareness of your brand. Trust me on this

Don’t forget that every single e-commerce website has probables and possibles they want to convert; no one is lucky enough to only receive definites as visitors. For a site like Amazon, they’re probably doing a pretty good job of converting them all but they know they can still do more. This is why they run hundreds of tests a year in order to increase conversion. The key thing for large sites to remember is that if you have lots of traffic, even a very small increase in your conversion rate can result in a lot of extra revenue.

There are still many easy wins out there in terms of on-site CRO. I see sites daily and think “if only they did this, I bet they’d get more sales”. Tying to optimise your website for more conversions is always a worthwhile task, regardless of your intent to buy profile. However, don’t expect to become the best converting site in the world just through on-site CRO – it’s not going to happen.

Some important things to remember about Intent To Buy

• As I mentioned earlier, no-way-joses are still important. Sure, there’s no chance of them buying this session but if you create a positive impression they might come back in the future to buy or they might recommend you to someone else etc.
• It’s not just your website that affects conversion; so does the service you provide. I recently stressed this at an internal presentation; your conversion rate should really be a company wide objective. If you provide good customer support via phone and email, you can increase conversion. If your delivery courier is crap and never delivers parcels on time, this is likely to decrease conversion as customers won’t return or recommend. You get the picture, I’m sure
• Your intent to buy profile does not remain static. If you convert a possible and provide good service, that visitor is more likely to be a probable when they return in the future, right? By the same token, as awareness, trust and reputation of your brand changes, so does your intent to buy profile.

In conclusion

The fact is, we are nowhere near fully understanding the thought processes of customers before they land on a website; I gave myself a headache several times while writing this post. However, as you can hopefully see above, intent to buy is an immensely important factor in determining the conversion rate for any e-commerce site. In my opinion, if you’re attempting CRO you should at least be aware of this. I’m sure no one doing CRO goes around promising conversion rates of 20% to their boss/clients for small or mid-sized e-commerce businesses. If your boss or client asks why this isn’t possible, maybe now you can just link them to this post

As I mentioned earlier, CRO as a whole is still a fairly new art. Sure, many people have been optimising landing pages and checkout funnels for a long time, but general understanding of intent to buy is still very much in its infancy.  It really stretches much further into the immensely complex areas of behavioural analysis and general human psychology, so there’s a long way to go before it’s fully understood. There’s no doubt in my mind that as time goes on, we will be able to evaluate this information much better. Then you might see a few more CRO blog posts focusing less on what’s happening on your site and more on what’s happening off it.

Intent to buy profile pictures based on images by David McCandless

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