GoPeer locates a path to an optimized funnel using Journey Maps

School is now in session

The landscape of education and e-learning has radically shifted over the last year as the result of COVID-19. As the demand for virtual learning resources continues to dramatically increase, GoPeer knows their online tutor marketplace and virtual classroom resources could provide vital support for families and students seeking digital solutions for academic mentorship.

To ensure they’re ready to meet the rising demand, GoPeer has been working tirelessly to optimize their product and platform. That’s why GoPeer’s Head of Growth, Danhui Schmidt, has been laser focused on creating an optimized funnel for new customers discovering their product. Unfortunately she didn’t always have access to everything she needed to determine what changes would be best.

“We have always wanted to be able to analyze user behaviors between two important steps in our funnel, but didn’t have insight into what actions users were actually performing between those steps and how those choices influenced their journey,” recalls Dani. “Designing a growth experiment meant working around the information we didn’t have and relying on our gut instincts.”

But when GoPeer got early access to Heap’s first Journey Maps feature, Top Events, Dani realized that the new tool could help her quickly unlock the insights she had been searching for.

Getting to the right answer

“Through Top Events, we are able to get an idea of all the events that users are performing during our onboarding flow,” says Dani. “This has been so helpful in optimizing our funnel because before it would have taken a lot longer for less accurate results than Top Events offer.”

“In our funnel there is an ideal path a user could take where at the end of onboarding they click a ‘start free trial’ button to get redirected to our pricing page. We had concluded that people who viewed our pricing page during their first web session were more likely to convert to a free trial. Through Top Events, we were able to get a clear idea of all the events that users are performing at this step, and discovered that only 20% of the users click on the free trial button.”

“What we hadn’t realized before Top Events was that there are actually a variety of other actions users can take on this page that direct them down different paths. Users can send a chat request to a tutor, view a tutor’s profile, or schedule an interview. Each path eventually directs back to the pricing page, but we hadn’t considered the influence each option had on conversions.”

The student becomes the teacher

“A crucial analysis we’ve been working on is determining the impact tutor interactions have on conversions so we can place those events at the most optimal funnel stage,” says Dani. “We wanted to answer questions like ‘Do users that receive a chat response from a tutor in the same first web session convert to a free trial at a higher rate?’ But it was too hard to pinpoint the order that users completed our chat events.”

“With Top Events we can easily contextualize these interactions with a time range. We can clearly see how many users have completed one event, like receiving a chat response, before performing another action. Before this user behavior data was underutilized, but now we can leverage it to unearth key insights that we can confidently act on.”

From data to insights to action

“Even though we just got access to Top Events, we’ve already been able to implement some improvements from our findings,” says Dani. “For our onboarding flow experiments, we did discover that changing the button text from “Start Free Trial” to “Pricing” more than doubled the users who actually clicked on the button from 17% to 43%.”

“We have already planned additional experiments to improve our free trial conversions and are thinking through even more ways to leverage Top Events. Thanks to Heap and Top Events, we now have real insight into the full user journey which means it’s easier to run experiments, evaluate impact, and create solutions that deliver the right results.”