How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Conversions: A Guide for eCommerce Owners
As eCommerce owners, you know data is vital to the success of your online store. From calculating inventory to understanding the total number of sales — data can tell you whether your store is on the right path to success.
As you know, among all the tools one can use for harnessing data, Google Analytics stands out as the most reliable for marketing analytics. It reveals to you what metrics to pay attention to and improve conversion.
In this article, we will look at how to make sense of the data provided on the Google Analytics dashboard and how you can use it to improve your eCommerce conversions.
This article is not aimed at specialists. they know all of this and a lot more. But it’s always important to know how to speak with people you might want to hire who can take things to another level. And hopefully, this article will help you to do some of the basic stuff yourself.
1. Find Your Website Traffic Sources
Google Analytics gives you information on who visited your website and the pages they visited, whether it is landing pages or product pages. The software provides reports on direct traffic, social media traffic, email traffic, organic traffic, and even referral traffic.
You can use the report to compare eCommerce traffic sources for different periods or tell which marketing campaigns drive organic traffic and affect your sales.
But why is understanding where your traffic is coming from important? Traffic sources can tell you where to target your marketing campaigns.
Let’s say you are running giveaways through social media, but most of the traffic is referrals. In that case, it should signal that your social media marketing campaigns aren’t efficient and probably change strategy to referral marketing.
2. Find Your Target Audience
One way to improve conversion is to identify who your target audience is.
An audience report is useful in developing the right customer personas. From your analytics dashboard, you can get data on your customer’s gender, age group, devices used, location, and interest.
Here is how to make use of the audience’s data. Your visitors’ interests tell you what attracts your audience to your store more often. You can use that knowledge and decide what to offer as an upsell, cross-sell, or another better product choice.
The device reveals what gadgets visitors are accessing the store. If most visitors access your online store from mobile phones, offer mobile-friendly interfaces and experiences to create a personalized purchase journey for consumers.
Age groups tell you whether you are attracting the right customers. If you sell upscale designer bags but discover that mostly seniors visit your site, it should signal your marketing campaigns attract the wrong audience and make adjustments.
3. Learn About Your Ideal Customer and Their Behavior
Improving conversion does not stop at finding your target audience and building your customer personas. You also need to see what makes your audience click. Google Analytics tells what type of products customers view, click on, add to cart, or purchase.
From your Analytics dashboard, you can see which products are hotcakes and slow-moving by category, brand, and product name. With the knowledge of your customer’s user behavior, you can tweak your website and have the best products viewed first so that users spent less time searching for their favorite product.
Knowing the best-selling products will also help you choose what to promote during seasonal sales like Black Friday. These strategies eventually improve conversion as they ease the customer’s purchase journey.
4. Track Your Marketing Campaigns
Knowing whether your marketing campaigns are a success is vital to improving a store’s conversion. Google Analytics can tell what type of marketing campaigns generate sales or high bounce rates.
You can find which landing pages people interact with more often and make it to the cart. You can also get data on funnels that are most effective.
For example, if you are using videos in your marketing campaigns, you can find the number of people who make it to checkout after watching a video. This can tell you whether to change the content on your landing page and include videos to ensure more visitors stay longer on your page.
It can also tell you where to re-target your customers, whether on social media or other websites. The most significant factor to monitor under marketing campaigns in your analytics report is paid search. PPC campaigns are quite expensive, and if you are running any such campaigns, be sure it is as efficient as possible.
5. Speed Up Slow Loading Pages
Slow loading pages increases bounce rates and ultimately harms your conversion.
Your online store should load in under three seconds. If you have trouble with the site loading speed, use Google Analytics to find slow-loading pages and fix them.
A fast loading site improves user experience, makes visitors navigate your site easily, and ultimately improves conversion by reducing cart abandonment.
6. Find Keywords and Search Terms
Keywords and search terms are essential in positioning your product and content to be found in search.
Google Analytics gives you a report on which search terms or keywords customers are searching on your website. With the insights from customers visiting your page, you can use the right keywords and optimize your website and products to rank higher in search results for what customers are looking for.
7. Keep a Note Of Your Progress
Another important component you can get from Google Analytics is your store’s progress. Have the changes made on your website and marketing campaigns to improve conversion generated results?
If yes, Google Analytics keeps this data to help you stay organized and informed on what store’s management strategies are working.
Making any positive or negative changes to your website and marketing can help you avoid future mistakes in your marketing campaigns. Tracking your progress ensures that you maintain better SEO management practices, marketing campaigns, and website designs.
Conclusion
The survival of an eCommerce store lies in sales. But to drive more sales, you must always look for ways to improve eCommerce conversions.
If you have ugraded your eCommerce store with more inventory and even added more content distribution platforms, but your sales have plateaued or tanked, it is a sign to identify the barriers to purchase.
Google Analytics is your number one tool for studying eCommerce data. It helps you track bounce rates, conversion, traffic, keywords, and marketing campaigns.
This report or data helps guide your marketing campaigns to move the customer along the purchasing funnel and improve conversion.
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