In a face-to-face marketing or sales experience, you can find out about your customers through a personal interaction. You can ask questions to help you serve your customers better, expand your products or services, or improve your customers’ experience.
In an online business, understanding your customers isn’t as straightforward. But it’s still important in eCommerce to know your customer and take action to improve your business. You want to ensure people are finding your site and buying your product.
You can use Google Analytics to benefit your business, as it has insights that will provide information on your site, your visitors, how they found your site, and more. This can help you find new customers and increase your conversion rate.
Let’s explore a few simple ways to use Google Analytics for the benefit of your eCommerce business.
First off, let’s define a couple of important terms to get on the same page. If you already know these, you can skip ahead.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – simply defined, this is a measurable and repeatable process that sends signals to search engines that your pages are worth showing up in Google’s search index. Google is the dominant search engine.
eCommerce – is the term for commercial transactions conducted electronically on the Internet, including buying and selling of goods and services. This can be business-to-business, business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer or consumer-to-business.
Google Analytics – is a service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It can be a great ally for your business with the insights it can provide, including information about your site, your visitors and where they came from. Obviously, the first step is to set up an account. Once that’s accomplished, you’re on your way.
Now let’s look at three simple ways you can use Google Analytics to maximize your SEO, and increase your revenue opportunities. After all, your goal is not just to show up on search engines, but to use that to grow sales.
SEO, then, is a key for any online business. You want to ensure your site shows up when people are searching for the product or service that you offer.One of the ways people find your business is through the keywords on your site that show up in search results. A top priority when you’re selling online is to identify keywords that not only produce visitors, but also produce revenue and sales. You can explore and enhance the biggest-benefit keywords using Google Analytics.
In your Google Analytics account, go to the “traffic sources” tab and navigate to the “keywords” option. Select “eCommerce” from the options within the keyword report and then sort by revenue. This will produce an ordered list of the highest revenue keywords on your site, and will allow you to investigate their performance. Google Analytics will even provide a look at revenue per visit.
How does this help you? Once you find keywords that are bringing in revenue, that information can help you gain more revenue. Those keywords are obviously already showing up on search engine ranking pages, so imagine if they moved up the rankings – that could be an immediate positive impact on your bottom line. You can then invest time on enhancing visibility of these search terms.
While increasing your existing valuable keywords should be a priority, another focus should be on expanding the assortment of keywords that bring traffic and sales to your site. Once again, you can use Google Analytics for this task.
The information is once again in the “traffic sources” tab, in the “keywords” option. Select “eCommerce” and sort by revenue.
Using this information, look for patterns in your highest performing keywords, and then you can use that to build closely related keywords, or different categories that are similar to the keywords already working for you. Google has another tool – the Keyword Tool – that can provide new keyword ideas.
Google can also perform site search tracking, which allows you to see how customers search your website. With this tool, you can analyze what people are searching for on your site. You may find that users are searching your site believing you sell what they want, so by looking at the searches, you may find opportunities for new products. You may also find opportunities for new or different keywords or keyword phrases based on their searches.
Another way Google Analytics can help your online business is by displaying when searches take people to the wrong page.
Let’s use an example. Let’s say you have an online business that sells travel purses, laptop bags and other travel accessories. When people search for purses, perhaps Google takes them to the travel accessories page instead of directly to the purses page because it has more authority within that search. People will see all the accessories rather than purses, and head back to the search page instead of finding and purchasing a purse on your site. This is known as a “bounce-back,” which is when people “bounce” back to the search engine results page instead of staying on your site and making a purchase.
To identify these “bounce-backs” or targeting issues, once again go to “traffic sources” and “keywords.” This time use the dimension drop down button that is above the data table, and select “landing page.” This will now provide insight into the most popular landing page for a particular keyword or phrase, and will give you key metrics like bounce rate. This allows you to see which of your pages have a high bounce rate and what keywords took people to those pages.
It’s best to focus on those pages with the highest bounce rate. Start by identifying the landing page that would be better suited for the keyword or phrase (the purses page in our example). One solution is to put an anchor text link from the homepage to the landing page to increase the authority of the landing page. You can also build external links to the desired landing page. It may take some time, but Google will eventually figure out the more relevant landing page.
Bounce-back is an issue you will want to continue to monitor and fix, because Google uses metrics like bounce rate in ranking your website.
Final Thoughts
These are a few simple ways you can use Google Analytics to optimize your website and increase your opportunities for revenue. It will take some work, but will pay dividends. One of the benefits of the world of eCommerce is the vailability of data to inform decision-making. It’s important to use that data to your advantage.
Author Bio: Callum Mundine is part of the marketing team at One Egg. He is an Amazon marketplace & white hat link building specialist, and has launched multiple successful brands on Amazon.com. Callum like his eggs boiled.