For the thousands of online shops, managing your own website is a business necessity in order to increase your online visibility, the number of visits and, ultimately, your sales volume.
Google Analytics tools contribute greatly to achieving these objectives. Here are a few ways to optimise your online shop activity using your own GA data to achieve better results in terms of profit and revenue.
Collect data relevant to your online business
You have a lot of information about the users who visit your online store, so it’s important to select meaningful data to aggregate into periodic reports for comparison of results.
Collect demographic data (age, gender, occupation, education level), with the location of your users by city, by region (geographical areas, urban/rural split) and by country. Analyses customer behaviour on the site, by categories: new customers, returning customers and customers returning after a longer period of absence.
Monitor the average time your customers spend browsing your online shop pages. Consider the sources that brought them to your site and count the abandonment rate of searches and the shopping cart.
More and more internet users access ecommerce platforms from mobile devices, so it’s a good idea to also consider the technologies your customers are using when they enter your site. Create a tracking matrix to determine the proportion of those using a smartphone, tablet or laptop and which browser they prefer.
This will allow you to analyse the dynamics of the relationship between your customers and your online store to assess the quality of interactions and identify the changes needed to increase the effectiveness of your site and the volume of conversions.
Select useful reports for your online shop
For effective ecommerce tracking, choose relevant reports that allow you to analyze classic marketing channels and help you segment your data to generate the best insights.
Set up reports that show real-time user activity on your site (real time reports) These are 30-minute reports that give you up-to-date details about where visitors are located, the type of content they are accessing on your site, and the nature of events in their interaction with your online store.
To go deeper, you need audience reports (audience reports), which tells you which sub-categories of users and their characteristics so that you can determine their customer profile.
Select purchase reports (acquisition reports), which shows you which channels bring you the most visitors, how they interact with the site and the proportion of those who become customers, i.e. complete the purchase of products and services from your online shop.
Continue with behaviour reports (behaviour reports), for monitoring new and recent visitors, plus identifying those who have returned after an absence of more than 3 months. These dashboards make it easy to analyse buying behaviour and help you see the strengths and weaknesses of the site you manage.
The most important are the conversion reports (conversion reports) that include volume and efficiency figures for your online business: total hits, number of visitors who visited at least one product page, number of users who placed products in the shopping cart and those who did not (just browsed the site without initiating a transaction), number of visitors who placed products in the virtual cart but abandoned it before purchase.
Interpret GA data for your online business strategy
Google Analytics reports help you segment customers, differentiate your portfolio and customize your offerings.
This will help you get personalized segments, monitor mobile traffic, learn about bounce rate trends, and pinpoint the high-performing pages that bring you the most conversions.
GA’s proprietary data accurately shows the quality and quantity of traffic to your site, highlights organic results, and allows you to set alerts to take action as soon as custom reports have deviated from your expected levels and profiles.
Based on these interpretations of GA data you are able to improve your SEO strategy and change the way you do business online to increase your site’s effectiveness, visitor numbers and conversion volume.
