Google Analytics is one of the most powerful free tools out there an eCommerce business can use.  It provides powerful insights into your site’s visitors which you can use to help shape your marketing strategy to drive online growth.

Here are some ways you can use it to help increase conversion rate as well as how it can help make your marketing campaigns more targeted:

Traffic Channels

The traffic channels report allows you to see where your traffic is coming from during a set period of time.  This can be found by going to Acquisition>All Traffic>Channels (see screenshot below).You can delve deeper into each channel to see more low level data to provide you with more insight on your site’s performance.

Firstly, it’s probably best to explain to those of you that don’t know what the different channels refer to:

Organic Search

This is traffic that comes from search engines.  Predominantly most search traffic comes from Google and Bing.  This will be because one of your visitors clicked on a link in a search engine results page which then brought them to your site. Having high organic search traffic would indicate your site has high quality content and a strong SEO strategy.

Paid Search

This traffic comes from any PPC campaigns you have running, for example, Google Adwords.  High traffic for this channel would indicate your ad content and keywords selected are engaging and performing extremely well.

Referral

This traffic represents visitors who have clicked a link on another site. Having a high amount of referral traffic indicates that your site is being talked about which helps give your site a strong domain authority which means you’re strong on all fronts from an SEO perspective.

Domain Authority is calculated by scoring your site by looking at the following metrics:

• Number of external links,
• Quality of the external links
• Quality of content on your site
• Number of times your content is shared, commented and liked on social networks
• How SEO friendly your site is in terms of site structure and user experience.

Social

This traffic is from any social media channels you are using to engage with your customers. This data can help you shape your Social Media strategy as you’ll know what social media channels your customers generally use whether it be LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. so when investing in ‘paid for’ social campaigns you’re confident you’re going to get a significant increase in revenue.

Direct

This represents visitors who came directly to your site through either typing your URL directly into the address bar or who may have clicked a bookmark.

Email

This shows the number of visitors that have come from an email campaign.  Here you can see what campaigns were the most successful so you can investigate why this might of been to help refine your email marketing strategy.

The traffic channels report provides you with some of the following key insights:

• Where your traffic comes from
• Channel with the highest conversion rate
• Channel with the highest revenue
• Highest and lowest traffic channels

The above insights will help you refine and enhance your marketing campaigns to be more targeted and will also ensure maximum ROI, increased revenue, increased engagement and minimise marketing budget wastage.

Audience Demographic

One of the most valuable reports in Google Analytics is the Audience Demographic report which shows you who your customers are.

It can tell you some of the following about your visitors:

• Gender
• Age
• Location

Many business owners or marketers are surprised of what data they see in this report as they’re often shocked to see so many visitors from a certain location, or a certain age or gender visiting their site who their not capitalising on.

Knowing the gender, age or location of a visitor allows you to personalise the experience. For example, if you had a high percentage of visitors that were women you could make sure that they only see the products that are relevant to women on homepage when they enter your site and can also make sure your marketing campaigns are targeted where your customers hang-out online and offline to gain maximum interest.

You can also have this in mind when creating engaging content that will appeal more to your target demographic.

Lastly, knowing the location of your visitors is crucial especially if you have ambitious growth plans for international expansion as you’ll already have the data of what are the highest country origins of traffic to your site.  This will compliment your growth strategy by informing you of what markets you should be entering first in order to mitigate risk.

Mobile vs other Traffic

The mobile overview report details metrics for each device type a visitor uses to visit your site whether that be a desktop computer, tablet or mobile.

Some of the vital data it provides you with are:

• Number of sessions
• % of new sessions
• Bounce rate
• Average session time
• Average number of pages viewed during a session
• Conversion Rate
• Number of transactions
• Revenue

Knowing the above information might show, for example, that 40% of your traffic is from mobile but through mobile you have an extremely low conversion rate and it also only makes up only 10% of your online revenue.

This might be because your site is not responsive or maybe it is responsive but the checkout has too many options for customers and really needs to have more thought around customisation of the design of the checkout to help increase conversions.

Having a low average number of pages during a session might be because of the poor user experience of your site on mobile so this should then trigger some analysis of your mobile site in order to find out what the issues are and where they’re located.

You should be using Google Analytics to help decide what enhancements you should be making to your site.

This is only a fraction of what you can do with Google Analytics.  Get in touch here if you feel you need help creating a successful marketing strategy for your eCommerce business.