On The Trail

A recent ClickZ article by Shane Atchinson has caused a ton of good discussion on the Web Analytics news group In a nutshell, Shane Argued that traditional linear conversion funnels are fairly useless because few people browse a site using a common conversion path. He argues that a hub and spoke model is much more accurate, wherein the hub is a particular page/section of interest and the spokes are the paths away from it. Some spokes move towards a conversion (this is good), while some move away or are dead ends (bad).

He is right, of course. Linear conversion funnels are great for shopping carts where you have to complete a series of steps in a specific order, but that is really all they are good for. Looking for common multi page paths in pages that are not part of a defined process is a pretty big waste of time. The hub and spoke model, whether your hub is a single page or a group of pages, is usually a much more productive use of time because it reflects the reality of what is happening in most cases.

Actually, that brings up a good refinement of Shane’s argument. The “scope” of the hub and spoke can and should change. At the most macro level your hub and spoke model shows how people are getting to your site. The hub is your entire site, the spokes link out to the internet. Zooming in a bit you can see how people move from your entry pages towards conversion, or to dead ends (hubs are the entry pages, spokes are where people go from them), The final zoom in would be figuring out how people end up on your conversion page. In this case the flow of the model is reversed, the hub is the conversion page and the spokes are incoming links from other pages on your site. The metaphor we use internally is that of ripples on a pond. The conversion is where the rock hit the water, the concentric circles are the various levels of “zoom” as you move farther and farther out.

This is just a model and it doesn’t work for every site; there will always be exceptions. On some sites the traditional linear conversion funnel fits perfectly. But I would argue that on most sites a hub and spoke model of traffic analysis makes much more sense.