Insight into your data is very valuable, it helps in foresight. You can know why people are doing what they are doing, which steps they are making, and what causes them to make a favourable/unfavourable decision.
It’s funny how businesses, especially in the third world, don’t know how to use analytics to come up with good business decisions. We’ve not yet realized the importance of data and data interpretation in business growth.
Some even believe the only reason why they need google analytics is to see how many people are coming to their website, their analytics view just stops there, instead of identifying conversion opportunities from your analytics report.
This week’s course focuses on identifying conversion opportunities via google analytics.
It’s not looking at numbers but asking yourself how can these numbers affect my business, and which opportunities can I optimize from the data — dimensions and metrics — this will help you to look at your analytics account in a whole new way.
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What to evaluate in your analytics report?
- Is this better or worst than the rest of the data on my website
- Is it something respectable or looks like a sore thumb
For example, a lot of traffic coming from paid/CPC medium, after carrying out a PPC campaign is understandable, but low traffic after a PPC campaign is something to look out for.
The first thing to consider is looking at your behaviour report — site content — all pages report to see the page value alongside the page view. Page value report show if the page is bringing in money.
Here you can spend time on your data, sort by highest page views, page value, bounce rate, etc.
From this data, we can see the highest page views and relate them to the page value, bounce rate, and avg. time on page etc. From this data, the page with the highest page view is the home page, which is mostly as expected but the page value is quite low, so you can ask how you increase the page value of the homepage. And other pages with high page views and low page value. Also, a thing to note is that the bounce rate is quite low which is a good thing because it shows that people are moving from the home page to other pages on the website.
*Data sorted by highest page value*
*Data sorted by highest bounce rate*
Evaluating traffic quality
You can go to acquisition — overview to see the channels people are coming into your website. This report is nicely interpreted in a pie chart.
Then move from there to the all traffic report — source/medium still on the acquisition report, to look at your website source and medium. No 1 indicator to look at is what source or medium is bringing in the highest revenue. It’s good putting together users and revenues.
*Source/medium data showing the highest percentage of users*
This data shows the percentage of users arranged in ascending order. With this data you can see the source/medium that is bringing in a lot of users but having little revenue like analytis.google.com/referral is bringing in a lot of users but has 0 revenue, that’s an opportunity. Looking at how to convert these users to buyers thereby increasing revenue.
The first thing to do is to find out where these users are coming from, from what medium are they coming from, what page are they landing on the website from the referral site, what page are they leaving the website, etc.
Analyzing all this information will give you an idea of how to optimize for conversion.
*Analyzing the referral medium*
From our previous findings, we realize that a source and medium — analytis.google.com/referral — has a lot of traffic with 0 revenue, so we need to drill down more into this source and medium to find out more about it, you can click on it and use a secondary dimension to narrow down your findings. You can find out the landing pages, the people see when they come from that source, this will help you know if you are sending people to the right page from an external source if the page is welcoming enough and encouraging and inspiring them to stay and buy something on the website.
If you find out that the landing pages are not achieving what you want, you can create a custom landing page that will speak specifically to users coming from that source or medium and also them move down the buyer’s funnel.
You can also check the Exist pages to see where you are losing customers and see if you need to optimize the pages more or find other solutions to it.
Reading and interpreting data takes time and patience, you need to know the data and understand what the data is telling you. That is how to effectively optimize your analytics for conversion reports.
Read up the next article in the Startup Growth Marketing series – Building a Growth Engine for your Startup
