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 event, from initial interest to the final purchase. Access this by navigating to “Conversions” > “E-commerce” > “Shopping Behavior.” 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, 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.
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 an advanced metric that measures the percentage of sessions in which users leave your site after viewing only a single page. 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, navigate to “Behavior” > “Site Content” > “Landing Pages”. Here, the bounce rate is presented as a percentage, calculated by dividing the total number of one-page sessions by the total number of sessions. 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
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
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. Utilizing GA4’s comparison feature, found under “Behavior” > “Site Content” > “Landing Pages”, allows you 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. This can lead to enhanced content strategies and improved product placements. Internal search data, accessible under “Behavior” > “Site Search”, 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. In GA4, under “Behavior” > “Site Speed” > “Page Timing”, you can analyze page load times and identify pages that need optimization. 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. 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!
