The most important thing for any ecommerce site is making sales, and in order to do this the site must accumulate a strong client base. Customers are websites very lifeblood; as such it is imperative that you can evaluate what your target audience is and how they interact with your site. Google Analytics can provide a concise array of details about your users, allowing you to modify your site to keep returning customers and acquire new ones. Here we will look into how using a variety of visitor details acquired by Google Analytics can assist in developing your site to maximise goal conversions.
Visitor Trending
Visitor trending provides a variety of insights into how users interact with your site, whether it be the number of total visits a day, average page views per month or time spent on your site. Through this you can determine what your sites strengths and weaknesses are. If, for example, you are receiving a high number of visits but also have an inordinately high bounce rate then there could be issue with your main landing page. High bounce rates usually indicate that your entrance pages aren’t relevant to many of your visitors. You should work to make your landing page as compelling as possible and also ensure that the pages are appropriately tailored to the keywords and ads that you are using.
Visitor Loyalty
In a nutshell, this shows how loyal your clientele are. It looks at the number of repeat visits, how recent they are and length and depth of visits. These can help to determine whether you are maintaining customers (i.e. they are returning). If customers are not returning to your site then there could be a few issues, but at least you know what needs to be done. If you also cross reference this with length and depth of visits you can see how far users are getting on your site and how long they remain on it. Through these you can determine whether your site is confusing to navigate or perhaps has a frustrating checkout system.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking allows comparisons to be made with other industry verticals. You can make comparisons of visits, page views, etc. in order determine where you are behind or ahead in the market. Through this you can determine in which areas your site is going wrong and possibly pick up useful ideas from other sites.
Map Overlay & Languages
We will discuss these two sections together, not because they have direct similarities but because of the areas in which they can assist your site. Map Overlay provides you with a very powerful tool to view globally where your site is receiving visitors from. Languages basically does what it says on the tin, by providing you with a breakdown of the various languages of the visitors to your site. These are useful together as by combining them you can gain an insight into your users, both geographically and linguistically. This allows you the option to tailor your site and keywords for more specific geographical intent (E.g. ‘car rental London’), as well as providing additional language options if you have a large client base in India for example.
Browser Capabilities
This provides details of how users are accessing your site, whether it is the browser, the operating system, screen resolution, flash versions and java that their system supports. This is extremely useful as once you have an overview of this you will know how to tune your site to suit your users. If, for example, you have a large number of users with older versions of flash and no Java support then it may be prudent to reduce these elements. Furthermore, you can modify your site to work for the browsers that the majority of your clients are using. Of course it would be best to accommodate all browsers, but in the mean time this gives you a priority list.
Once you know the problem it can usually be easily fixed. Google Analytics will provide the analysis but it is up to you to make the changes your site needs. Knowledge can be a major asset when optimising your site for success.
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Tags: google analytics, SEO, website design
