How to use Google Analytics to optimise your conversion rate?

Google Analytics is your ideal partner for optimising your e-commerce site! The data provided by Google Analytics is a goldmine that can help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and thus improve your decision-making process. But you still need to identify the elements to measure that are useful for optimising your conversion rate…

Google Analytics to perfect your funnel

Remember, the conversion tunnel is the path that the user takes on your site. An optimised conversion tunnel is a fast and personalised journey that turns the user into a buyer, resulting in a higher conversion rate.

 

The most powerful feature of Google Analytics is the ability to map each step of your conversion funnel to your goals. This CRO information will be useful to measure the decrease in traffic at each stage of the funnel and the associated conversion rate. To access the analytics report, simply click on “Conversions”>”E-commerce”>”Buying Behaviour”. But if it were enough to determine which stage of the funnel offers the greatest opportunity for optimisation, Google Analytics would have little to offer. Don’t underestimate the tools available to increase your conversion rate! Let us guide you through the different KPIs and increase your conversion rate.

 

When Google Analytics rhymes with UX to increase your conversion rate

The key to a better conversion rate is the optimisation of the user experience. To do this, you need to know your users well in order to include your marketing strategy in the trend of hyper-personalisation, one of the marketing levers of the year 2021. The three things you need to know about your target are the traffic it generates on your site, its browsing medium and the precise profile of the various users.

• Keep an eye on the bounce rate

Your site generates a large number of visitors, but how many? Just look at the bounce rate. The bounce rate is an indicator that measures the number of visitors who have left your site after viewing a single page. How can you have good conversion rates if users leave your web pages within seconds?

The bounce rate is closely linked to your conversion rate because if many users leave your web page quickly, either you have very few users who find what they are looking for, or your offer is unsuitable. To access this famous bounce rate via Google Analytics, you need to click on “Behaviour” > “Site Content” > “Landing Pages”. This rate tells you whether your site provides the right amount of information for visitors to stay.

 

Note that there are three categories of bounce rate:

-The bounce rate on your main landing pages

-The bounce rate on all your category pages

-The bounce rate on all your product pages

 

As you can see, the lower the bounce rate, the better the user journey is optimised, i.e. the landing pages engage the user to stay on the site and the site responds quickly to their needs.

•  Segment, to segment, segmentation

How do these visitors get to your e-commerce site? Measuring the number of visitors to your site is a first step but this analytical data without segmentation is useless. It is not enough to know the number of visitors but also the media they use. This allows you to get to know the users better, but also to segment the data, which in large quantities is difficult to analyse.

At a minimum, you should look at two main segments based on the type of device the visitor is using: desktop (and tablet) visitors and mobile visitors.

If your site is generating enough traffic, you should grow in the following 4 segments:

-New mobile visitors

-Returning mobile visitors

-New desktop visitors

-Returning desktop visitors

In addition, as you go deeper into the data analysis, analyse the behaviour of visitors for each segment according to their medium. The difference between conversion rates on mobile, tablet and desktop will help you identify which channel to focus on.

Tell me who your user is, I’ll tell you what their customer journey is: analyse the user to better meet their needs

In order to obtain general information on the user profile, simply access the navigation menu where you will find the “Real Time” tab, which gives access to a more succinct version of Analytics providing limited options and data. This limited data is rich in information about the users who are currently visiting your pages: their location, the pages they are viewing and the evolution of the conversion rate.

It is not only the profile of the user that is taken into account, but also their actions during the buying process. Therefore, it is necessary to separate the different types of users to check their behaviour. Their study is divided into segments. It is essential to know how to create segments in order to carry out more in-depth and precise analyses. Useful segments are those created according to key actions on the site and which analyse actions relating to purchasing behaviour (abandoned cart, payment that does not work…).

Custom segments allow you to isolate specific data to track their evolution. To create a custom segment, click on “Audience” then “Overview” > “Add a segment” > “New segment”. For this new segment, please select the filters that apply to it in order to customise it and target the data that interests you.

The analysis of these segments is central to building a personalised customer journey that can increase conversion rates.

 

Page analysis, the essential ally for a flawless conversion funnel

Optimising your e-commerce page is an important action that contributes to increasing your conversion rate. How can Google analytics help you with this?

Google Analytics allows you to see which links are clicked and, more importantly, which ones are not. This insight is a good way to make the necessary changes for an effective layout. There are three parameters to consider: smoothness of navigation, the destination page and the performance of the internal search engine.

• Fluidity of navigation, a sine qua none condition

Site speed is an integral part of the user experience. In order to check the page load times, you need to go to “Behaviour” > “Site Speed” > “Page Timing”. Identifying slow loading pages is a first step to improving the user experience.

Evaluating your site speed involves not only measuring page load speed but also measuring speed by browser and browser versions. To do this, you need to create a dedicated report. To set this up, simply click on “Custom Reports” and choose “Flat Table” as your report type. Enter your dimensions (“Browser” and “Browser versions”) and your statistics (“Average page load time”, “Average document interactive time”, “Average document content load time” and “Sample page load”).

To this you can also add conversion rate, transaction and revenue metrics. These metrics will tell you what your revenue loss is on this version of the browser versus another and where you can make improvements through technical fixes.

• The landing page or “performance page” that perfectly accommodates the user

The landing page is the one that welcomes your visitor and the one that gives him the first impression of your e-commerce site. In other words, you must not fail if you want them to come back one day. The report on these landing pages is rich in CRO information, it clearly shows you which landing pages need work. Therefore, you can also prioritise according to the potential of the page. To do this, simply go to “Behaviour”>”Site content”>”Landing pages” and use the comparison function on the right-hand side of the screen.

• Use internal search to improve your site’s experience

On-site search is a great resource for finding out exactly what people are looking for when they access your site. You can see the number of purchases during visits to your site effortlessly. This is a valuable resource for optimising your page. Especially since using internal search puts you in the customer’s shoes, giving you a more concrete view of the user experience on your site. You can therefore consult a list of terms that users have searched for on your domain by clicking on “Behaviour” > “Site search” > “Overview”. This is an effective way to see if any users have used keywords for which you have not yet created a page or to refine your keyword inventory.

 

 All the mysteries of this curious Google Analytics are now solved. With the help of your new assistant, your website’s conversion rate will soar!