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As an ecommerce merchant that wants to make the most out of their ecommerce store, it’s important that you analyse data and work according to it. Afterall, you’ve spent a lot of time and resources growing your store.
When you’re planning to improve conversions, it’s of utmost importance that you identify the problems and make data driven decisions. You just don’t want to waste that hard earned traffic on a plethora of multivariate tests that just won’t contribute to increasing your conversions.
Before you even begin to optimise and test you should glance at the data you have on your Google Analytics. Use tools and reports inside the analytics account to identify pages with the most opportunity to increase conversions at the same time identifying issues with the pages with high bounce rates.
Sounds easy? It’s never that easy.
Knowing that data you have available in your reports can lead you to pinpoint areas that’re not working too well. Going deep inside will reveal the most likely problems. This will narrow down the changes and improvements you can make with your ecommerce optimisation strategy.
Here are the most important reports you should review to optimise your store and make the best out of it
But wait… before you jump on to the reports I want to stress on the fact that ‘you should never analyse the traffic on your store as whole’. Never calculate based on averages because your acquired users and prospects aren’t average. They don’t think and act the same way.
As you segment your audiences during marketing to get the best out of it. You should use segmentation here as well, as what works for one sort of audience might not work for another. It’s not worth the risk.
The least you can do is segment your traffic in desktop vs mobile users
How?
Hit the ‘Audience’ tab in your analytics, then go to overview and add a new segment. Whatever segments you select and analyse, make sure you run all the GA reports for all your segments.
Let’s start running these reports
There are many reports that you can run but these 5 reports are a must for ecommerce optimisation
- Demographics Report
- Mobile Overview Reports
- Site Speed Page Timing Report
- Funnel Visualisation Report
- Goal Flow Report
Demographics Report
Access: Audience→ Demographics→ Age
You cannot rely on these reports completely as the tracking code on your webpage doesn’t really know who’s landing on your website. It’s just logging the user information it has. In a few instances, you might have a 15 year old using the device of his 45 years old father.
It’s still important to know who your audiences are, how your content and messaging appeals to them and how those interactions affect your bottom line.
Mobile Overview Report
Access: Audience→ Mobile→ Overview
You should always segment your audiences into mobile and desktop, as mobile represents a significant share of online traffic. For almost 50 percent of the users worldwide, mobile is their preferred medium to browse and purchase.
According to the stats
“In the course of one year, desktop internet usage dropped from 54.86% to 46.5% while mobile users share marked an increase from 37.38% to 48.33% in November 2019”
Mobile Overview Report throws light on the acquisition of users of different devices.
In the above screenshot, you can see that the mobile conversion rate is lower than the desktop conversion rate. As a thumb rule, the average ecommerce conversion rate for mobile should be almost half of desktop conversions. Now this is an alert to improve mobile experience. As tablets account for less than 5 percent, majorly, of the traffic, any optimisation for tablets should be the least of your priorities.
Site Speed Page Timing Report
Access: Behaviour→ Site Speed→ Page Timing
Page load times or Site speed is one of the critical factors when it comes to conversions. Even Google’s algorithm takes it as one of the factors to rank pages. It’s not just a user experience problem, it’s a conversion killer – we can say that with certainty.
There are a few things that’ll send your users choosing an alternative to you, page load times is one of them. Waiting for content to load, checkout to update, carts to load, are a few instances that create a bad image in your users mind. Don’t expect them to come back to your website or store either. Almost 80 percent of the people who aren’t happy with your website performance are less likely to buy from you again. Even a single second delay can create a massive reduction rate in your conversions.
With this report you can view:
- Average Page load time
- Average document content load time
- Average document interactive time
Funnel Visualisation Report
Access: Conversions→ Goals→ Funnel Visualisation
Users go through a journey before buying something from your store and converting. This process, or path, can be visualised like a funnel. As there are many steps, there are many ways your funnel could have a leakage. This report gives you an on-point view view of the conversion path and the data of each step.
This report will not tell you why they exited but it’ll give you a clear view of where they exited.
You can always use this information to know what exactly happened before they exited the page.
- Check the content
- Look for bugs
- Check for technical problems
Or anything that might create friction in user experience while buying.
Don’t just start at the first step, go step by step – starting from the place in the funnel that has the lowest users on the page and proceed forward.
Goal Flow Report
Access: Conversions→ Goals→ Goal Flow
It’s similar to a funnel visualisation report but there are many advantages to using this over the funnel visualisation report.
One of the advantages it holds over the funnel report is that it backfills data, so there’s no accounting users who move back a step. It represents a more accurate user path.
It’s easier to understand the flow into and out of the pages. Moreover you can dig deeper in the data by clicking on the nodes, highlighting segments and segmenting data.
It’s of utmost importance to identify the loops, this is basically a user taking back a step. A good example of this can be when a customer adds a product to the cart and then goes back to look for a coupon code for a discount.
If the Goal flow report shows multiple loops then you need to work on the user experience.
The Bottomline is…
Google Analytics is a wealth of data available for you to increase conversions. While the reports we’ve mentioned here aren’t the only reports you should see but they should be at your top priority. There are a plethora of metrics and reports available in GA and you should track metrics that align with your business goals.
These reports can help you make data driven decisions that will certainly provide a much needed momentum to your conversions.
To know more on how to optimise GA for your ecommerce store, get in touch with one of our representatives today!
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Gaurav Sangwani
Gaurav is a GAIQ certified Content Writer & Strategist with a demonstrated history of working in the New Media and tech industry. Skilled in content writing, journalism, and content marketing, he holds a bachelor's degree in Mass Communication and a Masters's degree in English Journalism.
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