Finding Conversion Opportunities with Google Analytics

Web Analytics isn’t just vanity numbers to report. Its value is in identifying conversion opportunities that move the needle for businesses.

As part of the review of the Conversion Rate Optimization course at CXL, this week we look at how we can identify conversion opportunities using Google Analytics.

Though Google Analytics is a goldmine if you are a marketer tasked with identifying conversion optimization opportunities for your website, the majority of the users don’t go beyond the overall metrics on the homepage of Google Analytics (GA). In this post, we will look at the conversion opportunities by analyzing all the major data areas of GA which tell us who our users are (Audience reports), where they come from (Acquisition Reports), what action they take on our site (Behavior Reports) and what the outcomes of those actions produce (Conversion Reports).

Page Value: Under the Behavior reports -> Site content -> All pages, you find a metric called Page Value and it is a useful metric to measure the contribution of a page or set of pages towards conversion. Simply put, it is calculated by dividing the total transaction value (revenue + goal) by the unique pageviews.

So if you see a low page value, it means that there is scope to improve the content on that page which will contribute more towards conversions. It could be adding more content or conversion elements or goals on those pages, improving its value.

A slightly less useful, but highly visible and reported metric is the page’s bounce rate. For an internal page that is not a homepage, the bounce rate is the percentage of users that exit the site once they land on that page (or that page is the entrance to the site). The bounce rate in itself is not very valuable unless that is put in context to the other pages on the site as a whole or the objective of that page in the conversion process. So a high bounce rate on a campaign landing page with no navigation options is not necessarily a bad indicator and so you could look at improving that by a small percentage which will help conversions.

Traffic Quality: The most useful report under Acquisition Reports in the Source/Medium report which tells you where the traffic to your site is coming from. In this report, the source is the brand (e.g. Google) and Medium in the channel (e.g Organic Search). The next you want to check is the conversion figures — transactions if you have enabled e-commerce tracking or goal completions if you just have goals.

This metric needs to be compared across the source/mediums to analyze which of those are sending quality traffic to the site and which needs to be looked into more closely. For those with relatively lesser numbers, it could indicate to review the content on the pages the traffic is directed to or improve the targeting on those combinations.

Segments: The difference between an average analyst and a professional is how he or she uses the segmentation options within GA. It helps you qualify or dig further into the metrics that the reports provide. So if you analyze the conversion metrics across multiple segments, and there are more segmentation options than you can wish for, it will give you valuable insights. So there could be more valuable demographics that you can target, more prospective channels, specific devices, or geographic locations that are doing better, the areas to look for are almost endless.

Segmenting users by mobile and desktop often shows distinct behavior both in terms of engagement and conversion and a significant difference in those two segments gives us signs on design, usability, and even suitability of content for specific devices.

There are built-in segments that you can use or you can build any custom segment that will help you slice and dice the data the way you need it. When you start comparing different segments side by side, it can give really cool insights into their performance which could be used as inputs for optimizing ongoing campaigns or planning ahead.

Buyer Personas: Further to the above segments, it can be used to either create buyer personas (or your ideal customer profile) or to use GA data to review your existing buyer personas and alter them accordingly.

So if you haven’t gone through the process of creating a buyer persona, the GA data will be a good place to start where the data will tell you what your ideal customer profile looks like in terms of demographics, choice of channel, devices, and so on. On the other hand, if you already have defined your customer profiles, the GA data will be a good source to validate your definition and if required, make the required alterations based on what your data tell you.

Goal Funnels: This is another area where you can get feedback on how your site is performing in terms of conversions, and this is especially true for eCommerce sites since the number of steps involved in the buying process is more than that for lead generation. The visual representation on the goal funnel shows you the problem areas in it where the most leaks are happening and where attention should be focused on priority to reduce the leaks or drop-offs.

The cause for the drop-offs could be multiple and varied ranging from the offer itself to usability or technical issues. And the issue could be more relevant to a specific segment or group of segments which again gives us areas to look for optimization

Tracking Events: Last, but certainly not least, the use of events is a mighty effective way to identify conversion opportunities. Since the default metrics that GA provides are all based on page views, you definitely need to extend its utility by tracking custom events. It is not enough just to know which pages the users were on, but also know what they did on those pages as well — did they read the content on it, how far did they scroll down, did they watch the videos on it, and if so up did they watch it fully, did they download content, did they engage in chat and so on. The data will enable you to make the required improvements in design and content to have better conversions.

Though not an exhaustive list, the above will give you a whole of insights that are readily actionable and will go a long way towards improving conversion on your site. The good part or the bad part, depending on how you look at it is that you never stop optimizing the site as it is an ongoing process, and however optimized your site is, there will still be room to make it better and produce better results.

Ciao!