28 Jun How to Increase E-commerce Sales with Google Analytics

It can be very difficult to find success from a digital storefront without the help of Google Analytics. For 14 years now, Google Analytics has been an essential tool for collecting and analyzing data about website performance for businesses of all industries, especially those in e-commerce.

An e-commerce business is only as successful as the interpretation of its collected data. If that data is incorrect or not capturing the full picture, that can have dire consequences for your e-commerce store. Google Analytics exists to help the continuous success and progress of your online store by aiding in smart strategies to drive sales and reach more consumers.

Seven Ways to Use Google Analytics to Increase Your E-commerce Sales

Google Analytics, while powerful, is also a complex tool that can appear overwhelming to the novice user. To make things easier, let’s look at seven ways to increase e-commerce sales with Google Analytics:

1. Understanding Your Customer’s Journey

The steps your customers take from finding your content to making a purchase is what’s known as the buyer’s journey, and this process is unique for every business. While each journey is also somewhat unique to every customer, they generally begin with experiencing great personal customer service. From there, their paths may vary with only minor deviations.

Buyers will come across important turning points and questions along their journey, which are also likely to change over time. It’s important to know at what stages these points are occurring and how to best address them. Being ready for your consumers at every stage is how you deliver outstanding customer service and guarantee sales.

How does Google Analytics help here?

Google Analytics can help you discover where your customers are stopping, leaving or engaging with your e-commerce website content. The Behavior Flow report allows store owners to see where and how site engagement is occurring. Filtering the results by Source/Medium will allow you to see their journey based on channel. Examining your “Starting pages” followed by a “1st Interaction” column will then give you an idea of what stage of their journey customers were on and how they engaged.

These steps alone can help you better optimize your content to increase engagement and boost sales for your e-commerce store.

2. Improving Content via On-site Search

Along with products of value, customers want valuable web content. Without it, customers will not stay engaged with your brand and will quickly move on to your competitors. In order to provide that engaging content, though, you will need to know what your customers are searching for online.

The Search Term report within Google Analytics can help you discover exactly what visitors are searching for on your e-commerce site. With the report, you can view the words, products, keywords and types of content your customers are using. Utilizing this information to improve your content can drastically improve your SEO and search rankings, which will both retain current customers and gain new ones.

3. Discovering Consumer Interests

Similar to improving your content, discovering your audience’s interests is essential to e-commerce success. The Affinity Categories report in Google Analytics allows you to gather demographic and interest-based data on your website visitors.

Once you better understand who your customers are and what their interests are, you can then tailor your marketing efforts to better reach them. You can now also make sure that your brand is providing more relevant site content, as well. These steps will help create a more personalized shopping experience, which encourages more sales.

4. Tracking Product Performance

Google Analytics can also help increase conversion rates through tracking your product performance. Like any business, it’s essential for e-commerce business owners to know which products are selling better and gaining more attention than others.

In the E-Commerce section of Google Analytics, you can view and analyze Product Performance reports. These reports can be broken down and viewed by product name, brand, category, or stock keeping unit (SKU). Product Performance reports allow you to piece together which products are selling better than others as well as help provide you insight as to why changes in sales may be happening.

Other values you can analyze include revenue, quantity, unique purchase, average price and quantity, card to detail rate and product refund amount. All of these metrics—including sales—can help you improve your products, your e-commerce site and your marketing strategy.

5. Viewing the Time it Takes to Convert Leads

In conjunction with the buyer’s journey, it’s essential to know how many steps it takes for your consumers to make a purchase. Google Analytics’ Path Length report allows you to view the number of interactions customers took on your e-commerce website along their path to earning you a sale. 

Conversion values can additionally be viewed for every customer path length. These values and reports will assist in the development of your marketing strategies to increase sales and the number of loyal customers for your e-commerce business. Remember that your goal is to keep customers engaged throughout the entire process—not just the beginning or the end.

6. Analyzing Engagement

Landing pages on your e-commerce website are extremely useful for learning how visitors directly engage with your content. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Landing Page report in Google Analytics provides data on user engagement.

The Landing Page report features stats such as average duration spent on a page, bounce rates, and a comparison of which pages are generating more engagement than others. These data points can help you determine which pages are providing valuable content and direction to your customers as well as which pages need improvement in terms of content, design and website performance. It is especially important to decrease web page bounce rates in order to rank higher in search engine results.

7. Assessing the Value of Customers 

While nearly all businesses understand the importance of investing in loyal, repeat customers, it can be difficult to determine that actual value without the help of an analytical tool. The Lifetime Value report in Google Analytics allows businesses to estimate the value of every customer along their buyer’s journey.

Understanding a customer’s lifetime value allows you to properly allocate the resources of your e-commerce business to best cater to your customers’ needs while still increasing revenue. In order to assess this, the Lifetime Value report allows you to track the value of your customers gained via paid search ads, social media, email, and more.

Improve Your Business with Analytics Experts

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