If you’re driving more traffic to your website from advertising, search engines and social media but not seeing an uplift in enquiries, sign ups or sales, perhaps it’s time to focus a little attention on conversion rate optimisation. That is, reviewing your website and how well its navigation and flow is guiding your visitors on their customer journey, or how well your copy is resonating with them. After all, it’s not the size of your audience, but what you do with it that counts!
If it’s your website, you were probably involved with the build and design of it. You may have provided all the content for it too and briefed the designer on the pages you want and how the menu should work. When you’ve been close to a project like this, it’s difficult to step back and view it from the customer’s perspective. It’s very easy to lose sight of why you’re building it, who your customers are and what they need from your website. The customer journey is often overlooked and this is when your conversion rates can suffer.
The challenge, then, is to identify potential issues and opportunities with your website content, layout and flow that might be stopping potential customers in their tracks and sending them fleeing to your competitors.
This is where Google Analytics can shed some light!
What reports and metrics to look for to improve conversion rates
Goal Conversion Rate
Bit of an obvious one to track since we’re talking about improving conversion rates, but it’s amazing how many Analytics accounts are not even set up to track goals (or worse still, tracking Google’s ironically named “Smart” goals), so tracking the conversion rate becomes impossible.
What’s a good conversion rate? It depends! We’d hope to see something above the 1% mark as a starter, but it will vary depending on what you’re selling, your website content, where your traffic comes from, etc. Whatever your conversion rate is, there’s always room for improvement.
Find it under: Conversions > Goals > Overview.
[Or if you have an e-commerce website and have e-commerce tracking set up, you’ll what to track your e-commerce conversion rate under Conversions > E-Commerce > Overview.]
Bounce rate
We’ve talked a lot about bounce rate in the past (and we’d recommend reading this article about how bounce rate is calculated here) so we know that it’s not always a bad thing, but if you’re expecting people to view more than one page on your website, such as a landing page, followed by a contact us page, followed by a thank you page, you know that a bounce isn’t a good thing as people are leaving after the landing page and not taking their journey any further.
A high bounce rate would indicate that your landing page could use some work.
[If your landing page captures your customer’s details and they don’t need to visit a second page (e.g. the form is submitted on the same page and you don’t redirect them to a thank you page), a high bounce rate isn’t a bad thing.]
Key report: Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages
Site Search
Under the Behavior section in Analytics and Site Search, you’ll find several reports that indicate how people use the search feature on your website. Obviously, this requires that you have a search box on your website and that you’ve set up tracking within Analytics.
A high number of visits that require the use of the search feature, could indicate that certain information is difficult to find, or you’re not delivering the information visitors are looking for on your landing page.
Some users will be willing to stick around and hunt down the information they need by trawling through each page on your website, but others will be more impatient and use the search box to speed up the process.
Use the Search Terms report to identify what information people are looking for. Can you include this (or a link to this) on your key landing pages? Could you restructure your website or relabel your navigation to make this content easier to find?
Behavior Flow
Your Behavior Flow report is more than just a pretty chart, it can give you insights into your customer’s entire journey on your website, from what page they land on to where they went next. More importantly, it will show you the drop-offs on each page; the people who simply left your site.
Some pages are natural drop-off (or ‘exit’) pages as it’s where a customer naturally finishes their journey. For example, a contact page, a thank you page or payment completed page would be the perfect page for your visitors to leave. Your home page? Not so much. Unless, of course, you have a 1 page website!
Analytics will provide you much more information about how people interact with your website than the reports and metrics listed above. For example, it would be helpful to view your conversion rates on different devices, browsers and from different channels as there could be issues with your website’s compatibility for certain users, or the quality of traffic you’re driving from different sources. The data in Analytics is vast, there’s no doubt about it, but the key is finding the information that’s relevant to the customer journey and being able to interpret what it means and what opportunities it poses to further improve your website’s conversion rates.
Found this helpful? Want more information about tracking website visitors in Google Analytics? Leave us a comment below 🙂
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