Google Analytics can be a great help in increasing your conversion rate. Many tactics for boosting the rate of conversion start off with user examination and presenting different versions of the same website page to a minimal number of visitors. It’s similar to a doctor prescribing treatment without first determining what the problem is.
Prior to attempting to make any modifications, it is necessary to identify the difficulties that are influencing your conversion rate. You can take advantage of the tremendous amount of analytics information you have access to, allowing you to locate apparent problems with conversions that can be quickly taken care of.
Before attempting to solve your conversion issues by exhausting yourself, open up these five reports for swift solutions.
1. Keep Up with the Screens
People can view your website from a range of gadgets, from desktops to laptops to smartphones to tablets, and most recently the so-called “phablets,” which all possess various screen sizes. Having a website that will adjust to different devices is advantageous, however, you won’t be able to recognize if your site design is inadequately working if you don’t pay attention to the data.
The objective is to determine which screen resolutions cause the user experience to be inadequate for a responsive or mobile website design.
At first glance, this report appears to be similar to the one that can be found in the Audience > Mobile > Overview tab. This one will let you look into each type of device in order to see details connected to the screen resolution and device information (just in regard to mobile devices). Follow these steps:
1. Apply the custom report
2. Look at the category-level metrics
Select which type of device you would like to analyze in-depth.
3. Look at the most common screen resolutions for that device category
See which features are associated with below-average performance metrics and conversion rate.
If you select a certain display resolution, you can view the make and model of the device that accessed your website using those dimensions. In this instance, the guilty party was a first model iPhone.
Once you work out which screen resolutions and devices your website design isn’t working on, there are a few approaches you can take to identify the main problem. The most effective way to utilize your website is to go through the gadgets you have previously specified. You might not possess an out of date iPhone lying around. In that case, you have a few other options:
- For responsive websites, a simple solution is to resize your desktop browser to the appropriate screen resolution. For Chrome, you can install the free Window Resizer plugin to quickly snap your browser to the desired dimensions. Similarly, for Firefox, you can try out Responsive Design Mode.
- Plug your website into a browser-based emulator like Screenfly. It will display your website based on sizes of popular devices, or you can set your own custom dimensions. You can easily switch between landscape and portrait modes with this option.
Determine the reason for the malfunction of your web design, get a front-end developer to repair it and this will put an end to the loss of conversions.
2. Know When Your Visitors Are Converting
Which days of the week do you usually see higher visitor conversion rates? Business hours or after work? Understand the moment when your guests change and it can have major impacts for website communication, social media promotion, and internet advertising campaigns.
Objective: To find out when customers are likely to make a purchase.
3. Monitor Your Site Performance
Your website is incurring losses every passing second. A substantial portion of the effort devoted to improving conversion rates concentrates on the design and contents of the page, yet sometimes people back out of the page before they even encounter those factors.
The objective is to detect areas of your website that take a long time to load and are resulting in a decreased conversion rate.
Google Analytics provides some metrics for calculating page speed. We’ll focus on Average Document Interactive Time. This is the amount of time (in seconds) that it typically takes for a page to be processed and ready for a user to interact with it. Follow these steps:
1. Apply the custom report
2. Look at with the “Comparison” view
It is located in the top right corner of the table. Select “Avg. Choose “Document Interactive Time” from the drop down list to compare how long it takes for your most visited webpages to load against the ordinary speed of the website. You can identify the pages that are not performing well.
3. Find slow-loading web pages
Check to see if there is a connection between long loading times and bad behavior metrics or a bad conversion rate using the drop-down menu. The speed of this website’s main page and its blog is exceedingly poor. The two sections of the website that are mainly used by new visitors and are crucial to the start of the conversion process are these.
4. Find Low-Converting “Keywords”
We’re fully cognizant that Google Analytics no longer supplies organic keyword information. This does not signify, however, that you cannot gain important insights into how your web pages carry out in natural search results.
This report will help you figure out the multiple ways to get access to keyword info within Google Analytics so that your keyword targeting can be more effective.
The purpose is to make your website’s landing pages as effective as possible for search terms that drive conversions.
If you are keeping on top of your website’s search engine optimization, you should be changing your page titles so that they contain terms related to what you are trying to promote. This document indicates how well your website’s landing pages do when accessed through search engines, classified according to the heading or search patterns. Essentially, we’re A/B split testing our page titles here. Follow these steps:
1. Apply the custom report
2. You’ll see your site’s landing pages ordered by organic searches
You will observe page titles of the landings pages, as well as other sites pages that viewers researched while on your website, as a supplementary dimension. It would be beneficial to increase the span of time for this report, especially if you updated your web page headings recently.
3. Use the search box or the advanced filtering to search URLs or keywords
4. You can take this report one step further by going to your Google Search Console account
Once you have signed in, click the Search Traffic option, select Search Queries, and then switch the tab to the “Top pages” view.
5. Find your landing page in the table
For that page, if there is any informational data regarding keywords, a symbol resembling an arrow will be located to the left of its URL. Press this arrow to observe how your search terms are doing. The graph demonstrated above shows that the keyword included in Variation B of the page title is yielding significant, advantageous clicks to the page.
After looking at some of your best landing pages using this report, it will be possible to recognize similarities between the keywords that drive the most conversions. Perhaps they’re location-specific or include sales qualifiers. Take the lessons from this report and use them to improve the performance of your underperforming landing pages. Try testing to see the effects of your changes.
5. Check Your Visitor Behavior by Browser Type
Many folks choose their favorite web browser and keep using it. When did you last check your website using Internet Explorer or Safari? It is a frequent mistake to disregard how the code of your website functions on commonly used internet browsers and the compatibility issues that may arise.
The objective is to discover any technical and user experience issues that are particular to a certain web browser.
How To Set Up Conversion Rate Goals In Google Analytics
Google analytics can create reports that show the performance and measurements of a single web page. These accounts provide a basic starting point and overview. You must devise a variety of personalized reports, objectives, and pathways to monitor users’ movements on your website.
Setting Conversion Rate Goals enables you to evaluate the passage of people from one page of your website to the next.
You can find out what portion of website visitors for a software-as-a-service company move from the homepage to the services pages. For an e-commerce website, you can monitor user activity going from the category pages to the product pages and beyond.
Creating goals in Google Analytics
Log into your Google Account to develop your first GA goal.
Select the “Admin” option in the left-hand side menu, which will guide you to the administrative area of your Google Analytics account.
Select “Goals” from the View section in the administrative area of your Google Analytics profile.
The page that shows all the objectives that have been set for your account is referred to as the goals page.
If the “New Goal” button isn’t showing up on your Goals page, then you lack the required authorization. In order to view the “New Goal” button, you must have “Edit” authorization at the account level.
If you possess the necessary permissions, you will then be able to observe the “New Goal” button.
Google analytics offers three different top-level goal categories:
- Template-based goal
- Smart goal
- Custom goals
These different top-level categorizations of goals boils down into 5 different goals types which Google analytics supports:
- Destination: These GA goals are measured by website users visiting a web page. Examples of destination goals could be order confirmation or a “thank you” page from a contact form.
- Duration: These Google Analytics goals are measured by the visitor spending more than a certain time. For example, you might be interested in tracking visitors that spend more than 30 seconds on your website.
- Pages/Screens per session: These GA goals are measured for visits that have more than a certain number of pages per session. For example, you might be interested in tracking visitors that visit more than 3 pages of your website in a session.
- Event: These goals measure different events tracked in Google analytics based on the event category, action, label, or value.
- Smart Goals: these goals use machine learning to analyze different signals about your website visits to determine which of those are most likely to result in a conversion. Smart goals are popular for AdWords conversions. While there might be some benefit of using smart goals, they are a lazy way out. Do not expect Google to do the heavy lifting on your behalf!
Google Analytics Goals as We Like Them for Ecommerce Websites
People do not move in a single line when they browse a website. We jump from one page to the next. We go back and forth.
Maximum value can be obtained from single-page reports, however, if our intention is to elevate the conversion rate for the website, it is essential that we establish and investigate different objectives related to it.
For the visitor to make a purchase on your website, they will need to complete numerous steps. It is essential to establish distinct objectives to observe how people navigate through these miniature funnels.
Here are some of the funnels we usually set up for e-commerce websites:
- Homepage to Category pages: this is a goal that tracks the navigation from your homepage to the different category pages on the website.
- Category pages flow-through rate (to product page): this is a goal that tracks the navigation from the different category pages to the product pages on the website.
- Search to product: this is a goal that tracks the navigation from the search results pages to the product pages.
Shortcomings of GA goals
There are a few shortcomings of Google analytics goals that you should be aware of:
- If you create it, you cannot delete it: As you create different goals in Google Analytics, you will eventually find out that if you create a goal, there is no way to delete it. Your options will be to either:
- Remove/delete its different steps and rename the goal to something so that you signal to yourself and other team members that the goal is not a valid one.
- Change the name and the steps with another goal (make sure to annotate your GA account when you made the switch), let it live, and remember that you are not paying for GA.
- Initial data collection takes 24 hours: After setting up the goals, it takes up to 24 hours for initial data collection and for the goals to be populated. This becomes an issue for many beginners because many set up the goals and wait for 24 hours to discover that they had a mistake in a particular step. That is the reason you should pay close attention to every URL you are including in the goal setup.
- They are not real-time: goal data is not real-life data which is typical to other data forms from Google.
- No segmentation: We love segmentation and GA did an amazing job adding both standard and custom segments. The only problem is that there is no way to apply these segments on top of GA goals. This is a huge drawback. There is no workaround to this except creating different Google analytics views to represent the segments you want to track and re-create the goals in them. This seems like a lot of work and data duplication but as of now, this is the only way open available.
After you set up the initial goals in GA, there are two ways to view them:
- Funnel visualization report
- Goal flow report
Over to You
To do conversion optimization effectively, divide your time equally between gathering and interpreting analytics data, interpreting qualitative research, developing new designs and figuring out which design increases conversions.
