FullStory + Convert: Identifying Conversion Roadblocks & Removing Them for Good.

Dionysia Kontotasiou
By
March 28, 2019 ·

Poor conversion rate optimization is making random guesses.

Good conversion rate optimization is all about informed guesses.

Robust tools like FullStory put the “inform” in informed guesses.

FullStory helps companies record and analyze customer communications by recording user sessions in a privacy compliant way.

FullStory recordings can be searched for specific events, including link usage, rage clicks or dead clicks. In addition to data on individual sessions, FullStory can also retrieve analytics on aggregate customer behavior, showing the most clicked items, the most rage clicked areas and the most navigated to site sections.

As an A/B testing tool for seasoned optimizers, Convert Experiences integrates out of the box with FullStory, allowing testers to zero in on conversion roadblocks that are frustrating customers and then eliminate them by choosing a variant that provides a better digital experience.

Integrate Convert Experiences with FullStory

Integrating FullStory with Convert Experiences allows you enable session replay capabilities within your Convert Experiences account.

Set up Integration:

To integrate the two platforms:

  1. Add Convert Experiences Tracking Code to your website
  2. Add FullStory Tracking Code to your website
  3. Track custom user variables

(For more details, read the full step-by-step  instructions here).

Verify Integration

Once the installation is ready, verify the setup by installing the Convert Chrome Debugger.

What Data is Used in the Convert Experiences + FullStory Integration?

After the integration is enabled, every recording in your FullStory account will be tagged so: “Convert: AAA – BBB” where:

  • AAA – the name of the experiment limited to the first 20 characters or the Experiment’s ID as found in your Convert account, depending on whether you have data anonymization enabled or not;
  • BBB – the name of the variation limited to the first 20 characters or the Variation’s ID as found in your Convert account, depending on whether you have data anonymization enabled or not;

Inside your FullStory account, you can filter recordings based on a certain Experiment – Variation pair to analyze visitor behavior when served a particular variation:

Inside your FullStory account, you can filter recordings based on a certain Experiment

What’s Next: Unleashing the Real Power of FullStory + Convert

Once you have Convert with FullStory up and running, what next?

Now we’ll show you how even with a basic knowledge of Convert Experiences can help you improve your landing pages, your form fields, your CTAs, your responsive design and much more. You can see:

  • How many visitors your website gets
  • How long your visitors hang around
  • What state (or country) they’re from
  • Which devices (mobile, desktop, tablet) your visitors use
  • From which campaign they land in your store
  • If your product image is actually appealing.
  • If the store inspires an action from the visitor.
  • If the product’s positioning on the page is awkward for the customer.
  • If they have to scroll down too far to get to the product.
  • Whether or your not as an effective, clear value proposition & CTA?

The amount of information can feel overwhelming and we recommend not diving in too deep at first. Focus on the key metrics that really matter to you.

Even a simple analysis can prompt changes that may have a huge impact on your store.

The point of integrating Convert Experiences with FullStory is to get as much insight into user behavior as possible.

The more you track, the better you can understand how your visitors interact with you site.

Attain eCommerce Excellence with Session Replays

Session replay tools like FullStory allow e-commerce websites (Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, etc.) to get a glimpse of what an actual user does during his or her stay on the site. The tools allow the company to have an image of what a normal user clicks and doesn’t click, what ads are often seen in the line of sight and how long each customer takes to make the decision to buy, search for more products and services, or close the website browser altogether.

FullStory offers data driven patterns or estimates of customer browsing behavior on the site.

Based on this blueprint, which would otherwise stay hidden, the e-commerce sites can make informed decisions about what works for their site and brand, and what does not!

When you integrate your eCommerce platform with FullStory+Convert, you unlock the ability to watch your customers’ sessions on your site, from start to finish. FullStory’s robust search capabilities help you create customer segments, build conversion funnels, and pull up the sessions that match your exact criteria.

This ability to observe how your customers move around your site and navigate through trouble spots yields powerful insights for improving UX and conversions, which can then be tested with the help of Convert Experiences.

Example code on Magento platform:

Example code on Magento platform

Example code on Shopify platform:

Example code on Shopify platform

Improve Store Revenue by Reducing Bounce Rates

A bounce is defined as “a session that triggers only a single request to the analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the analytics server during that session”.

Bounce rates are bad, right? Especially for Ecommerce stores where people don’t come looking for answers to questions and a bounce may be the innocent indication of them actually finding what they were seeking!

While bounce rates point to something going wrong, or signal the relative performance of different traffic sources, or sub-optimal UX, they don’t tell you about what is actually working (or not working) on the page.

To understand what is helping or hindering conversions on the store, it is important to further analyze pages with high bounce rates with FullStory.

Here’s how the process will work.

  1. First, identify underperforming pages using Google Analytics (or your preferred analytics platform).
  2. Then, search for session recordings on those pages in FullStory using the URL in question as your segmenting parameter.
  3. You can then refine your results further, based on other criteria (such as sessions referred from a specific URL, or visits with a duration of 60 seconds or less). You can also cut your search by sessions that contain signals of user frustration.

Once you have a list of sessions to watch, set aside an hour to make observations. Take notes in a spreadsheet of any surprising behavior:

  • What’s being clicked — or not clicked?
  • Where does user attention seem to drop?
  • Is anything on the page breaking?
  • Are key elements being obscured?

Once you hit a point of diminishing returns — review your notes and see if any trends appear.

After a while, this qualitative analysis reveals a couple of immediate, unequivocal improvements that have to be made and a handful of nice-to-have ideas. Execute the immediate improvements and use your ideas (with Convert Experiences as your A/B testing tool) to experiment.

Convert Experiences as your A/B testing tool) to experiment

Tag Team with Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool no tester can do without.

It provides top-level data on site visits and user flows. When you draw Google Analytics into your integration story with FullStory and Convert Experiences, you can find answers to questions like:

  • Why does a customer keep reporting problems with the signup form?
  • Why did she miss the “Add to Cart” button?
  • Why did that customer stop making purchases 2 weeks ago?

These are answers that refine subsequent testing efforts with even better hypotheses.

Through our integration with Google Analytics Universal, you use the FullStory Session URL sent to us as a custom dimension within Google Analytics.

Through our integration with Google Analytics Universal, you use the FullStory Session URL sent to us as a custom dimension within Google Analytics

If you’re already using Google Analytics Universal and want to check out the integration, you simply need to flip a switch from your FullStory settings page.

Once you have authenticated the connection between FullStory and Google Analytics, you will be able to use the FullStory Session URL custom dimension anywhere you can use a dimension within Google Analytics.

Use Chats to Boost Store Performance

Lead generation is the process of identifying and targeting potential new customers (otherwise known as leads) with the intention of cultivating their interest in what your business has to offer.

The hope of every business owner is that most visitors will eventually become a lead, and that every lead will eventually become a sale. This can be achieved by analyzing your live chat data (Drift, Help Scout, Intercom, Olark, etc.), pulling in FullStory insights and then sealing the deal with Convert Experiences and A/B testing.

With the FullStory built-in visitor monitoring feature, you have access to information like:

  • Which pages your visitors are browsing.
  • Where in the world your visitors are located.
  • How your visitors have found you (such as what they typed into their search engine, and which search engine they used).
  • How many times your visitors have visited your website.
  • What contact your visitor has had with your website.
  • Other behavioral information such as how long your visitors have been browsing.

When you activate FullStory on your site, every new chat begins with a link to the customer’s FullStory session. While on chat, your reps can see what they’ve been browsing or pinpoint their technical issues.

They can then use the opportunity of the chat in progress to further investigate conversion roadblocks.

With the supplemented qualitative and quantitative data in hand, crafting hypotheses and deploying A/B tests (or even personalizations) to remove frustrations and add purchase relevance to offers is an easy road ahead.

Amplify Customer Support and Customer Success Efforts

Your job is to support customers efficiently and effectively, with as few touches as possible.

The challenge is that support tickets can be terribly vague and unclear—customers struggle to explain just what isn’t working, or what broke on your site.

“Could you take a screenshot?” … “Could you walk me through what you were doing?” These common support questions have been nearly unavoidable and result in complex, hard to understand answers. They can quickly take a bad customer experience and make it worse.

The problem of understanding context around a support ticket goes away with FullStory. With FullStory, you record all of your customer’s sessions online so that you can replay their experiences, and by watching these video-like recordings, you can determine how they have been using your product, what features they have tried (or not), and what questions they might have.

  1. When you connect Convert with FullStory and Salesforce Service Cloud, your support professionals no longer have to waste time asking customers to describe their issue. Instead, each support ticket is linked to a video-like replay of the customer’s step-by-step actions and the issue as it unfolded from their perspective. Say goodbye to asking for screenshots and explanations, and say hello to faster solutions and smoother, happier interactions.
  2. Similarly, integrate Convert with FullStory and Salesforce Sales Cloud to give your product and marketing teams a pixel-perfect view of exactly how individual customers are using your site whether they are bucketed to original pages or variations.
Salesforce Sales Cloud

It is easy to jump to conclusions when experimenting on your store or site.

While you can’t bypass the possibility that your optimization efforts will not yield desired results, with the Convert Experiences and FullStory integration, you definitely reduce the probability. And all without archaic code or the jargon of stats.

FullStory offers you the truth about your customers’ digital experiences as a “story” and Convert Experiences takes that story to its logical conclusion of improvement.

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Originally published March 28, 2019 - Updated January 18, 2022
Written By
Dionysia Kontotasiou
Dionysia Kontotasiou
Dionysia Kontotasiou
Convert's Head of Integration and Privacy, helping customers with technical queries.

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