Posted: Thursday, March 25, 2010 in
Google Analytics
For e-commerce websites, it is absolutely critical to have a proper implementation of Google Analytics that includes e-commerce tracking abilities. With this added code, you can see what sales you got from what sources and the associated revenue, allowing you as the business owner to make data-driven decisions about where best to spend your marketing money.
One thing that may be overlooked in this process is the “goal”. Commonly used to track micro conversions or macro conversions that don’t result in direct revenue, goals can also be applied to e-commerce websites to give you more data about your sales process.
By defining your receipt page as a “goal” in Analytics, you can then leverage the funnel visualization tool to set up a series of steps you’d like to see customers take on your site, and track how they perform. For example, let’s say you have a simple website that sells one product: Michigan State-themed Snuggies. You then would define your receipt page as a “goal” and then you’d associate the following funnel to it: first, you’d want to look at customers who start at your homepage, then who proceed to the product detail page, then to the shopping cart page, then to the payment details page, then who finally end up at your goal of the receipt page. This way, you have set up your funnel to see how people react to every aspect of your web design: from your home page’s call to action, to your product details page’s product descriptions, to your cart design and checkout process.
The value comes in using this to see which part of the process is broken. Maybe there is a very high fall off from people who view the cart page to those who actually enter their payment information. This could mean that the call-to-action and design of your shopping cart page needs tweaking. At Brand Labs, we saw this happen with one of our clients, which led us to create a modified version of the Volusion shopping cart page that has less distractions and a clearer call to action.
There’s no limit to the insight you can get from this funnel. From home page redesign, to merchandising issues, to navigation issues, the combination of goals and funnel visualizations can help any e-commerce site owner improve their site and drive more conversions.
Posted: Tuesday, March 9, 2010 in
Google Analytics,
Michigan
An all-too-often overlooked feature of Analytics is the Map Overlay, located under the Visitors section. To the untrained observer, this tool simply shows you the regional breakdown of where your traffic to your site comes from around the globe, but with a little bit of refinement, you can use it to visually compare how users in different cities, states, and countries interact with your web marketing efforts, and understand how it impacts your bottom line.
While working with one of our clients from our home state of Michigan, we made great use of the Map Overlay to demonstrate a better way to target their PPC efforts. Their brand is strong, drawing customers and users from all over the world to their locations. Through the power of the Map Overlay, we were able to visualize where the site’s international traffic was coming from, and then combined it with their e-commerce reporting to see which countries converted the best.
Now, you don’t have to be a geography whiz to see that the Midwest made the strongest showing, with the Mitten State leading the pack, but this begs the question: if we’re getting most of our sales at home, how can we best reach out to our hometown crowd? We then segmented the e-commerce data for Michigan to see which traffic sources produced what revenue at what conversion rate. Our findings: Michigan residents were much more likely to convert from offline marketing efforts and organic searches; the company’s PPC efforts in the state were not drawing in the desired high-potential visitors they were in states like Illinois and Wisconsin.
Because of this analysis, we were able to re-target the client’s PPC efforts (and budget) away from Michigan to other more valuable states, and focus more of their SEO efforts on keywords that Michigan residents were converting on. Of course, this is just a single, isolated example of the depth of Map View’s utility and it bears noting that there are little gems just like this scattered throughout Google Analytics. We’ll offer tips and tricks as time goes on, but here’s one you can take with you right now: get Google Analytics on your darn site immediately. (We understand that this is more of an imperative than either a tip or trick, but you should listen and obey. You’ll thank us later)
