Analytics packages can help you sell more
Knowledge is power and Google Analytics is one way to get it. Questions it can answer include: how many customers do you have? How do they behave? Are your marketing strategies working? Which ones work best?
What are the important reports for your online retail business?
There are a swathe of different reports and results you could look at in analytics – tracking them could become a full-time job. But there are some key metrics that you should definitely be looking at. Here are some reports which I think are incredibly relevant.
Ecommerce overview
This is certainly one of the most important reports at your disposal. It will show you stats around revenue, transactions, products, conversion rates and traffic sources. You can find this section by going to Conversions – Ecommerce – Overview
The first thing you should see is your conversion graph – this tells you out of the number of visitors you had – the percentage who bought something. You can change this graph to visualise other metrics by clicking the down arrow next to Ecommerce Conversion Rate.
It will offer average value, revenue, unique purchases etc. You can also modify the graph to show you the results by the hour so you can work out which hours you make most sales etc. This information will help you to decide which products to focus on, when the best time to do marketing is, where you should market your products etc.
If you scroll further down the page you should see the data table. Here you can see which products and which traffic sources generated the most revenue.
Traffic Overview
Knowing how many people are coming to your store and how they get there is integral if you want to get more people through the ‘door’. To get to a full traffic report, go to Traffic Sources – Sources – All Traffic and then click on the Ecommerce link.
Once into this report you should be able to find out where most of your traffic is coming from and which source is the most valuable. You can find out how many pages people tend to go to per visit, how long they stay etc. When you know which traffic sources are already profitable you can concentrate your efforts on marketing on them to get more traffic.
If you visit the Search section of this report you will be able to see tables breaking down your organic search and if you have it, paid search. You can see which keywords people are using to find you and the revenue generated by each keyword.
If you using Google AdWords or thinking about it, this should give you an idea of how much these words are worth to you and how much you should invest.
Checkout funnel visualisation
Hopefully, when you set up your account you set up a goal funnel for the checkout process. Checkouts are where a huge percentage of online retailers lose conversions. This report will show you if this is the case for you, and if so, which part of the checkout journey is putting shoppers off.
You get to this report by visiting Conversions – Goals – Funnel Visualisation.
The data starts when people enter their shopping basket. You can then see what percentage moves onto the next step or who bounces to another page of your site or completely off it.
Ideally, you should optimise your checkout process so that everyone ends up purchasing something – to get to this you might need to do some tweaking and watch this funnel to see what makes a difference and what doesn’t.
Site search
This is only relevant if you have a search field on your homepage – most online retailers do. In order to get Site Search metrics you need to configure Analytics Site Search from within Custom Search. Once you have done this you can find out a wealth of interesting info which you can use to shape your site.
Looking at search results you can see what most visitors are looking for. From this you can surmise what people expect to find on your site, what they might have difficulty finding on the homepage and what you might want to create a new landing page for.
It will also help with your keyword search terms as you might discover popular variations of keywords that you hadn’t thought of.
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