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September 14, 2021
Thousands of ecommerce companies use FullStory and similar tools to gain valuable insights into their end users’ on-site or in-app behavior, but one of the biggest struggles is knowing where to start. And oftentimes, even if you do know where to start, you might not know how to mine and refine for the right digital intelligence insights.
The tips and tricks covered in this post assumes you (the reader) are already familiar with FullStory, how it works, and its core functionality built off DOM mutation-based session replay, user-defined segments, as well as metrics, dashboards and watched elements. For a primer (or refresher on FullStory basics) check out the video below:
FullStory Overview Video | See Why Product Leaders Choose FullStory | FullStory
With that out of the way, let’s dive into typical ecommerce cards for your FullStory Dashboards to help you know where to start and how to get conversion-funnel specific insights quickly. Each card will begin with an image that shows you how to build it in FullStory. Then we’ll provide an overview of each card's function, as well as why it’s important. Finally we’ll provide some additional tips that may help you tailor the card to your specific use-case. To best explain the construction of these cards, the images and descriptions will use generic element and URL names. Remember to tailor these to your specific site’s configuration.
Overview: This single metric card will provide the average number of PDPs that your users visit each session.
Seeing how PDP views per session vary across segments can provide a quick understanding of user behavior without needing to view a ton of session replays. Looking at how this figure correlates with conversion rate (CVR) and order size can also help determine how effective your promotional efforts are.
Tip: Make sure that you adjust the URL substring to the appropriate PDP substring on your site. If you have multiple URL structures for PDPs, you can define them with a custom event and use that instead of a visited URL event.
Overview: This metric trend card will provide a percentage of users that abandon the registration process.
It’s no secret that users that establish an account with your brand are more likely to convert and make return visits. Therefore, ensuring the registration process is as painless as possible is crucial. This card can work as a single metric to provide a quick overview. However, setting this up as a metric trend will allow you to quickly notice any spikes in abandonment. Then you can zero in on those specific sessions to determine what’s gone wrong.
Tip: Remember, if you have multiple URL structures (e.g. mobile and desktop), include them all to get an accurate representation of user behavior. Or you can set up a card for each structure to measure them separately!
If you have a URL for registration confirmations you can improve this card by following the template for Checkout Abandons (Card 3).
If you have a success message that loads when registration is finished, you can establish a watched element on that message and follow the template for Checkout Abandons (Card 3), replacing the excluded URL visits with users who rendered the success message. Note: watched elements feature available only with FullStory Enterprise license.
If you’ve defined abandonments in your data layer, you can use an API event instead to future-proof this metric from any potential changes to the URL structure or FullStory’s definition of abandonment. For help on integrating your data layer with FS click here.
Overview: This metric trend card provides a count of how many users are abandoning the checkout process. Since this card includes an Exclude operator, you will need to build this in segments first, and then create a card.
Of course, abandonment isn’t limited to registration, reducing checkout abandonment can often be the single biggest uplift to CVR. After all, a great experience while browsing the site won’t make up for a frustrating or broken checkout experience. And when we consider the peak-end rule, it’s important that the last experience a customer has with your site is a positive one. While this card provides an important metric at face value, it may be best when used alongside other cards that look at frustration in checkout. Just like registration abandonment, we recommend setting this up as a trend card.
If you already have a measure of checkout success rate, you may be thinking that this card offers little value. However, by looking at abandonments you populate your session playlist with just those users who left the checkout process, rather than everyone who began it.
Tip: Depending on how strictly you define abandonment, you may want to use some different operators. For a very loose definition, consider using “Clicked anything” in step two. For a stricter definition, consider using “/Checkout/payment” in step one.
Overview: This metric trend card will provide a count of how many times a promotion code fails to work. This card requires access to watched elements, as well as an error message to watch.
One of the quickest ways to sour a user’s experience is to prevent them from entering a promotion code. Between the advent of tools like Honey and the ubiquity of influencer specific promotions, the ability for users to easily and quickly enter a promo code has become the status quo. This card requires a bit of prep work, but can lead you straight to customers that are both showing intent to convert, as well as experiencing frustration.
Tip: Watched Elements are exclusive to enterprise level accounts. If you have error messages defined in your data layer, you can bypass this requirement by using the relevant API event instead of a watched element. If you’d like CXperts’ help in upgrading to an enterprise account, reach out!
If you have control over your site's CSS, you can prevent noise by making sure that promo code errors use CSS that’s distinct from other error messages.
Overview: This dimensionality card will give you a list of the most commonly entered searches on your site.
The benefits of this card are two-fold. First, it can be a great way to see where there is a gap in product. Maybe you‘re getting searches for “green widgets” but only sell red and blue. Second, it can reveal common typos. Maybe you’re getting searches for “bloo widgets” that are coming up with no results found. While gaps in product can be slow to resolve, typos can be quickly addressed with a redirect. This card works well alongside a card for most common searches that lead to errors.
Tip: To make sure you’re getting accurate data, ensure that your definition for the Search element includes all relevant CSS (remember, it may vary across platform, subdomain, or even just different locations within your site).
Overview: This funnel card will provide data on the count of users, the CVR, and the median time to convert. If you’ve configured a revenue event within your FullStory code, you’ll also get data on total revenue and average order value.
Breaking down CVR by different UTM trackers can give great insight into which of your marketing efforts are most (and least) effective. For the sake of explanation, this post shows the Email Medium, but any UTM tracker can be used. While it can be time consuming to build a funnel for each UTM tracker, doing so can provide an excellent overview of marketing successes and failures.
Tip: To keep organized, consider making a dashboard dedicated just to these funnels.
Overview: This dimensionality card provides a list of the most commonly clicked filters.
Gaining an understanding of the most commonly used filters can provide insights into which products and product categories your users are interested in that may not be represented in sales. If users are frequently setting certain filters (price, size, etc) and not converting, you may want to consider rolling out products that meet those criteria. You can also use interaction with filters to determine the best order to list them.
Tip: Depending on how filters are implemented on your site, this card may not capture many clicks. For example, if users click a checkbox or other non-text element, their click will register as Unknown in this card’s output. However, as more sites shift to a focus on mobile, it’s becoming common for filters to be a text-centric button which is ideal for this card. We recommend using Defined Elements to help add naming conventions for your site, app, or product into FullStory to make this and other features easier to use and understand.
As you can see, there are as many ways to leverage FullStory for insights as you can dream up; these 7 cards offer a great start to mining insights from the platform and building out your dashboards for quick insights on what’s working and not working within your digital experience. We hope this can help you jumpstart the important work of optimizing and improving your CX to the delight of your customers. If you have any questions on these tips and tricks or would like to learn more about how to use FullStory to its fullest for your business, drop us a line.
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