How can you change the behaviour of your visitors?
Using and understanding web analytics is vital for the success of a website, especially when it comes to ecommerce.
By Tim Pritchard, SEO specialist at ecommerce software supplier, SellerDeck
This article is for those users who already use and understand Google Analytics but are looking to get more out of it.
We’ll look at creating specific Google Analytics campaigns for research and analyse and work out the questions you need to ask yourself to get the most out of this tool.
Analytics can be a mass of numbers, figures, graphs and data which is easy to get lost in, so before you start a campaign you need to be asking yourself the following:
• What am I hoping to achieve?
• Which elements of my site are most important to this goal?
• Where do my visitors currently go?
• How can I change visitors’ browsing patterns?
• What next?
What am I hoping to achieve?
This is a very important question, and will inevitably give you a plan for your analytics campaign; every journey starts with the first step, but you need to know where you’re heading.
For an ecommerce trader, the answers to this question might be something like, ‘discover my most effective products’, ‘get more people to sign up to the newsletter’ or simply, ‘increase conversion rates’. Once you know where you want to end up and what you want to achieve, you can create a roadmap and plan.
Which elements of my site are most important to this goal?
The next step is to identify what elements you need to concentrate on. Unless you know what you’re looking for, many hours can be wasted trawling through masses of metrics – trust me, I’ve been there! Google Analytics has a fantastic tool for viewing ‘on page’ analytics so you can identify specific elements which could be affecting your sites performance.
AB testing is a fantastic way for identifying the best setup for your site. For example, if you are looking for more newsletter sign-ups, you can try different designs or placements of the link and compare the results month-on-month.
Where do my visitors currently go?
Now you have identified the elements that are important to concentrate on, you can analyse and report on what your traffic is currently doing. Having identified current patterns, you can implement the aforementioned changes and make comparison reports over time.
Whichever element is performing best at that stage can be the preferred choice moving forward. Try using filters and custom reports to identify your traffic’s route through your site in order to identify where they engage the most. Concentrate on aspects like bounce rates and time spent on page.
How can I make them change?
Now comes the time for implementing any changes. However, keep a backup of the previous setup or make detailed notes of exactly what has changed. Be wary of changing too many textual elements or else you’ll upset your SEO.
If you have some pages that perform better than others, examine where the traffic for those sites comes from (e.g. keywords used/inbound links etc), what people do whilst on your page and where they go from there.
Make comparisons to your lesser performing pages and make the changes necessary for improvement.
What next?
Lastly it’s time to analyse your findings and move forward with the highest performing elements. You can then repeat this process for other areas of your site.
Remember to constantly analyse your data in order to identify trends, peaks and troughs and react accordingly. When you have made changes, monitor your live analytics in order to make quick repairs if the change has been unsuccessful.
Adopt this mantra: plan, implement and repeat.
For more information, visit SellerDeck.co.uk
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