Google Analytics is one of the most important and powerful tools you can use to help understand your website traffic, and how users interact. It’s useful to identify what’s working well and highlight the areas that might need improvement.
Here are our top 10 actionable Google Analytics tips that will help boost your sales:
Understand How Leads Convert into Sales
As we know, the customer journey is an important part of consumers making a purchase. If you want to improve sales, you need to understand how customers navigate around your website from when they first load up your site, to when they make a purchase.
Using the Behaviour Flow report (under the Behaviour section), you can gain insight into the content people land on before making a purchase, the next pages they visit, as well as the last page visited before exiting the site. You can also filter this by “new users” to show unique visitors who have landed for the first time.
This will help you find areas for improvement and to understand common page sequences which you can analyse to create a better user experience on-site.
Create Custom Dashboards
There’s a lot of information on Google Analytics and it can be time-consuming looking through it all, however, custom dashboards allow you to quickly find the data you’re looking for easily.
Analyse On-Site Searches
Having a search bar on your website can increase website usability and visitor satisfaction as it’s a very useful tool, especially for users who have never visited the site before and are unfamiliar.
Using the on-site search terms report you to see the exact keywords that users are searching for, helping you gain an understanding of what they’re looking for and expect. You can also use this keyword data to create engaging content that the users want.
You’ll find this information under Site Search and Search Terms under the Behaviour Report.
Exclude Internal Traffic
It’s important to exclude traffic from employees to ensure the data isn’t skewed and you’re not accidentally analysing the behaviour of someone within your team.
Google Analytics has made it easy to filter out IP addresses from your team by going to the Admin section of your dashboard and clicking on Filters. Then add a new filter and add the IP addresses you want to exclude.
Use the Horizontal Funnel
Using the Shopping Behaviour Report you can use the horizontal funnel to apply advanced segments, see the funnel in multiple segments in the same report, the number of visits to each step in the funnel, and the percentage of visits that did not continue to the next step. This is vital information in understanding the customer journey.
Analyse Mobile & Desktop Sales
Even though most people spend their time optimising their website for sales, it’s important to also focus on optimising your sales for mobile conversions too, especially as mobile traffic has surpassed desktop traffic.
Under Audience you can use the Mobile Overview Report to analyse the sales and conversions for mobile visitors, and compare them to desktop.
You’ll be able to discover vital information such as if you receive a high level of traffic but low conversions on mobile, then you could assume that the mobile website isn’t easy for users to convert, and you can make the changes needed to improve this.
Analyse Website Speed
This is one of the most important factors for user experience on-site and it directly impacts your bounce rate. It can have a huge impact on your conversions, even before users have explored your site.
Under Site Speed click on Page Timings, this report will show you all the pages on your website and how the speed compares.
Set Up Custom Alerts
Custom alerts are useful as they allow you to take a proactive approach to monitoring your data, without the need to log into Google Analytics. It can notify you if there is a converse, revenue traffic dip which could suggest that something is broken and needs fixing.
To add custom alerts go to View > Open Reports > Customisation > Custom Alert > Manage Custom Alerts > New Alert
Compare Historical Traffic Trends
Gain valuable insights by identifying patterns based on previous traffic by using the Compare to Previous Period tool in the data range box, you can also specify custom date ranges with this tool. You can identify trends that you may not have realised existed before and understand your incoming traffic on a deeper level.
Reverse Engineering Your Sales
This is the process of working backwards from the conversion to understand how it was reached, understanding this will allow you to make changes to better drive people through each page to increase sales.
Navigate to Reverse Goal Path under Conversions to view the people who bought from you, instead of all website visitors.
These tips will give you a deeper insight into visitor behaviour and traffic, allowing you to boost your sales and conversions. At GA Agency we can help with our range of digital marketing services including data analysis, SEO consulting and paid media campaigns. Contact us to see how we can work with you as a strategic partner.
