For any business, whether service or product based, it is vital to understand how your customers are interacting with your website. Notice a high number of clicks on a certain page? Consider why this might be – have you posted new content that the user is finding interesting? Produce more. Is there a particular product that customers keep clicking on, but not buying? Look into why. Perhaps the image doesn’t display the product at its best or the ‘add to basket’ function isn’t working, maybe there is an error in the description. Rather than spending hours and trawling through your website, a weekly analysis of the pages you surface will allow you to identify opportunities and spot problems quickly. For this reason, regular analysis of the way customers are interacting with certain pages on your website is essential.
Although the Google Analytics homepage offers a top line view, it is vital to dig deeper to properly understand your customers’ behaviour patterns.
Find of-the-minute information
Head to real time>content on the left hand navigation of your Google Analytics homepage screen. This will provide you with an up-to-date summary of the top 20 pages. It tells you how many people are currently viewing them, and what percentage of people on site this amounts to.
At this point, you should take your top 5 pages and dig a little deeper
Head to behaviour>site content>landing pages (on the left hand menu). This will give you the information of pages your customers are ‘landing’ on and how they behave once they arrive there.
Analyse the landing page
A landing page is the first page viewed in a session, so where the customer initially lands on site. This is often the homepage, or a listings page that you have directed traffic to from an external website. Whatever the source, landing pages are the first point of contact a customer has with your site, so it is vital to analyse the performance of these pages.
On this section of google analytics, under the ‘acquisition’ header, you can see how many people have visited these pages, and what proportion of them are new users. Acquisition is key for all businesses, particularly start-ups, so it is important to understand how many new customers you are attracting each week. You can select the date range in the top right hand corner of the page to view how these figures change over time. Notice the percentage of new customers dropping off? You may need to re-consider your marketing strategy.
Understand the ‘bounce rate’
The ‘behaviour’ heading on this page also provides key insights. Here you can understand how long customers are spending on each page, and the ‘bounce rate’ of each URL. The bounce rate refers to the number of people who leave your site, directly after viewing the page. If you notice a page has a particularly high bounce rate, you’ll need to look into why this might be. If you sell products, perhaps the top few rows have low stock, and therefore the customer cannot find the size they are looking for. It might be that the page has not been refreshed for some time and the customer has already seen what you are surfacing. If you offer a service, perhaps the messaging isn’t very clear or the imagery is not right. Navigate to said page, as if you were a customer and consider the following.
When you land on the page, what can you see? Is it obvious what page you are on? Test the experience on both mobile and desktop. Perhaps the customer has landed on an ‘about us’ page but all they can see is your company logo because it is taking up the majority of the screen on mobile.
Does everything work? Test the links. If customers are clicking through to a broken link they will of course leave your website, as this does not provide a good experience.
How long does the page take to load? Consumers are fickle, and if your page takes a long time to load, people will simple close their browser and may not come back.
Have you refreshed your content recently? Is it still relevant? Check to see that what you are surfacing is both engaging and coherent.
Review revenue generation
Finally, under the ‘Conversions’ header, you can see how much revenue a page is generating. If you notice a page that has a particularly high number of transactions associated with it, think about where else you can surface it. Can you pay affiliate partners to surface it on their site, or lead a Facebook or Instagram ad here? Perhaps you should update the CTA (call to action- the URL the customers will be lead to, when they click the link) if you send out email communication to your database.
As you can see, there is truly an incredible amount of information to be found in Google Analytics, and this is just looking at one small section! The real success comes with setting up reports that allow you to compare this information week by week, month by month. This will allow you to spot trends emerging and amend your strategy over time. That being said, a quick check of this information each week will also help you identify any problems that you can fix right away. Similarly, being flexible in amending weekly trading will allow you to optimise your site and tailor it to how your customers are interacting with it.
Next week we’ll share more tips and tricks for using this incredible free tool to optimise your site and maximise sales. Stay tuned!
Just a quick note – if you haven’t set up analytics for your business yet, a great place to get started can be found here.
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