How to use Google Analytics to optimise your conversion rate?

Google Analytics, particularly its latest iteration, GA4, is your ideal partner for optimizing your eCommerce website! With the advanced tracking capabilities of GA4, you can delve deeper into user sessions, events, and the customer journey. This goldmine of data from Google Analytics helps measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategies, improving your decision-making process. However, the key lies in identifying which elements to measure for optimizing your conversion rate.

Google Analytics to perfect your funnel

The conversion tunnel, or funnel, represents the path a user takes on your site. In GA4, you can map each session and event within your conversion funnel. An optimized conversion tunnel is a fast and personalized journey that converts a user into a buyer, boosting your conversion rate.

Using GA4, track every step from the first visit to the purchase. Two places are useful. The Reports > Monetization > Purchase journey and Checkout journey reports show the standard e-commerce steps (session start, product view, add to cart, checkout, purchase) and the drop-off between each. For your own steps, build a funnel exploration in Explore > Funnel exploration. Note that since 2024, GA4 calls conversions key events. It's not just about identifying which funnel stage offers the most significant optimization opportunity; it's about leveraging GA4's full potential for detailed tracking and attribution.

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. 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.

Every session and event tracked in GA4 provides insights into user behavior. For instance, analyzing sessions can reveal where users drop off, offering clues on how to improve their journey. GA4 allows for more refined event tracking, including clicks, views, and interactions, crucial for understanding the customer journey.

Keep an eye on the bounce rate

Your site generates a significant number of visitors, but understanding their behavior is crucial. This is where the bounce rate becomes a key metric. In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that were not engaged. A session counts as engaged when it lasts longer than 10 seconds, includes a key event, or has at least two page or screen views. A high bounce rate might indicate that many users are not finding what they are looking for, or your offer may not be adequately aligned with their needs.

To view the bounce rate in GA4, open Reports > Engagement > Landing page. Bounce rate is not displayed by default: add it with Customize report > Metrics, or use it in an exploration. It is the inverse of the engagement rate, so the two always add up to 100%. Understanding this percentage is vital as it directly influences your overall conversion rate. A lower bounce rate typically suggests that your landing pages are effectively engaging users, encouraging them to explore further and potentially convert.

GA4 allows you to dissect bounce rates more granularly. You can observe bounce rates for:

• Main landing pages: The first point of contact for many visitors. A lower bounce rate here suggests effective first impressions.
• Category pages: These pages offer a broad view of what you have to offer. A lower bounce rate can indicate that visitors are finding the categories relevant and engaging.
• Product pages: The final step before a purchase decision. Here, a lower bounce rate is often a strong indicator of imminent purchasing intent.

Each category gives you insights into different aspects of the user journey. By monitoring and understanding these percentages, you can identify which areas of your site need improvement. Perhaps your main landing page is performing well, but your product pages have a high bounce rate. This discrepancy can guide you to optimize your product pages for better engagement and, ultimately, a higher conversion rate.

Remember, GA4's nuanced tracking capabilities enable a deeper understanding of how users interact with your site, which is essential for optimizing your e-commerce experience and improving your conversion rates.

Segment, to segment, segmentation

How do these visitors get to your eCommerce 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.

Initially, consider these two primary segments based on the type of device used by the visitor: desktop (and tablet) users vs. mobile users. This segmentation is critical because user behavior often varies significantly between these platforms. GA4 provides detailed analytics for each segment, allowing you to tailor your strategies accordingly.

If your site generates substantial traffic, you should consider further segmentation. GA4 allows you to dive deeper and segment users based on:

• Traffic Source: Understand whether users are coming from organic search, paid ads, social media, or direct visits. This segmentation helps in attributing conversions to the right channels and refining your marketing efforts.
• User Behavior: Segment users based on actions like session duration, pages visited, or specific events like adding items to a cart. This can give you insights into how different groups of users interact with your site.
• Purchase Behavior: Especially important for e-commerce, segmenting users by their purchasing behavior, such as repeat buyers vs. first-time buyers, can offer valuable insights for targeted marketing strategies.
• Engagement Level: Identify users who are highly engaged versus those with minimal interaction. This helps in optimizing the user experience and content for different engagement levels.

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

To get general information on who is on your site right now, open the Realtime report. It shows the last 30 minutes of activity: where users are, which pages they are viewing, which events and key events they trigger.

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…).

Segments allow you to isolate specific data to track their evolution. In GA4, segments live in explorations: open Explore, create or open an exploration, then click + next to Segments and choose a user, session or event segment. In standard reports, use Add comparison to put two groups side by side, for example mobile and desktop.

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

Optimizing your eCommerce pages is a pivotal action that contributes to a heightened conversion rate. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) plays a crucial role in this optimization process, offering deep insights into user interactions with each page. Understanding which elements on your pages engage users and which do not can significantly influence your strategy.

1. Analyzing User Engagement on Pages: GA4 allows you to track specific events on each page, such as link clicks or time spent on particular sections. By examining these events, you gain insights into user preferences and behaviors, allowing you to adjust your page layout and content accordingly for better engagement. For instance, if certain products have higher interaction rates, these can be positioned more prominently on the site. 2. The Significance of Smooth Navigation: A key element in user experience is the ease of navigation. GA4 helps you evaluate this by providing data on how users navigate from one page to another. It highlights pages that act as gateways and those that might be causing users to drop off. Analyzing this flow can help you identify bottlenecks and improve the overall navigational structure of your site. 3. Landing Page Performance and Conversion Rates: The performance of landing pages in GA4 is critical for understanding how well your site captivates the audience upon their arrival. GA4's detailed analytics show you not just the number of visits but also the quality of these visits. You can assess if these pages lead to further exploration or contribute to your bounce rate. In Reports > Engagement > Landing page, add a comparison or the key event rate to contrast different landing pages and focus on improving those with lower engagement or conversion rates. 4. Internal Search Insights for Enhanced User Experience: On-site search functionality is another critical area where GA4 provides valuable data. By tracking the search terms used by visitors, you can understand what your customers are looking for and whether your site effectively provides it. With enhanced measurement turned on, GA4 records a view_search_results event with the search term. You can read it in Reports > Engagement > Events or in an exploration with the Search term dimension. This data can also inform SEO strategies and highlight opportunities for new product lines or content. 5. Speed Analysis for Optimizing User Experience: Site speed is an integral component of the user experience. GA4 has no page timing report: to analyse load times, use the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console or PageSpeed Insights, or send Web Vitals to GA4 as custom events. Fast-loading pages are essential for maintaining user engagement and, consequently, a higher conversion rate.

By leveraging the capabilities of GA4 for page analysis, you gain a comprehensive understanding of how each page performs and its impact on the conversion funnel. This detailed analysis is key to creating a seamless and effective user journey on your e-commerce site, ultimately leading to improved conversion rates.

Fluidity of navigation, a sine qua none condition

Site speed is an integral part of the user experience. GA4 does not provide the page timing reports of the former Universal Analytics. To identify slow pages, start with the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console, which groups your URLs by load speed, interactivity and visual stability, on mobile and desktop.

Evaluating your site speed also means checking it by browser and browser version. In GA4, create a free-form exploration with the Browser and Browser version dimensions. If you send Web Vitals as custom events, add them as metrics.

To this you can add the key event rate, purchases and revenue. These metrics will tell you what your revenue loss is on one browser version 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, go to Reports > Engagement > Landing page and use Add comparison at the top of the report.

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. To see the terms users searched for, open the view_search_results event or build an exploration with the Search term dimension. 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.

Explain why your conversion rate moved

GA4 tells you that the conversion rate changed. To know why, break it down into its steps (sessions, product views, add to cart, checkout, purchase) and measure how much each step and each segment (device, channel, country) contributed to the change. This is what Datama does with GA4 data: it ranks the drivers of the variation and shows them in a waterfall, so you know which step and which segment to work on first.