Measuring Consumer Intent for Non Ecommerce Retail Websites

For websites that do not have an explicit revenue generating action for a user to take (such as completing a purchase), finding metrics for success can be a challenge. Often, this results in conversion metrics being based on the number of pages a user viewed or how long a user spent on the website.

Brendan Shanahan

While these metrics do at some level measure the amount of engagement a user had with a website, they are poor indicators if the user has intent to enquire or contact the business, or if they will complete the task they came to the website to do.

 

Further, it can be difficult to optimize marketing spend from your various marketing platforms based on these goals – there’s no point attracting users who merely browse your website and leave. We need to uncover the level of user intent towards enquiring about a product.

 

A lead scoring system can shed new light on user behavior, while also providing metrics that can be used to better determine the intent of a user and be used to optimize spend on remarketing efforts.

Developing a lead scoring system

The crux of the lead scoring system is your customer journey maps. These maps need to detail each step of a task or job that can be completed on your website, from the moment they arrive at the website until they complete the task.

For each task, there will be steps within that task that are more important than others. Consider the following customer journey map.

Inquiry Customer Journey

Points need to be allocated for each step of every journey  and must take into account common entry points and thoroughfare pages that may be used by many users  – but may not lead to conversion – by scoring them lower than pages that are directly pushing for the user to submit an inquiry or contact you.

In the above journey, we’ll need to determine which of the steps are more important for submitting an inquiry. In this case (as it’s a linear journey) these points can be easily allocated:

Following this linear journey, the user would have accumulated a lead score of 10 with a successful inquiry submitted. The conversion would be counted as a goal in Google analytics, alongside the user intent score of 10. 

If the user reached the inquiry form page but didn’t convert, we would be collecting an intent score of 10, but not have a conversion event captured. It’s this score that we can now use in our remarketing efforts.

Lead Score Intent Groups

Having scored each stage of the customer journey, we need to determine the different levels of intent depending on the score the user accumulates during their visit. Users with lower scores would be seen as lacking intent, while users with higher scores have much more intent. 

At a basic level this could be broken down like:

These intent groups are what we use to fire certain conversion events and marketing pixels to better segment your advertising audiences.

Integrating the Lead Score Into Your environment

Your tag management system is used to do the calculations based on the points that a user accrues during their session on your website. Depending on their score, conversion events and pixels are then triggered to tell Google Analytics and other marketing platforms which group the user falls in. 

Depending on your marketing approach, lead scores can be used to populate users into audiences based on their intent level, and hence receive different messaging according to  their level of intent.

In addition, these intent groups could be used to better enhance the customer experience on your website,for example, where do high intent groups stop? For users who start on ‘higher intent’ pages, what can be done to prevent them from wandering onto other pages away from submitting an inquiry?

Lead scoring can help your organization uncover further insights about your user’s intent to inquire, allowing you to better craft marketing collateral and improve the customer experience on your website. 

If you’d like to find out more about how a lead scoring system could benefit your organization, don’t hesitate to get in touch

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