Unlike the older version of e-commerce analysis in Google Analytics, Enhanced E-commerce is built on top of the powerful Universal Analytics. It gives you much deeper insights about your customers as well as also help you to optimize your website.
If you want to increase your website sales then read the post from start to finish. You will be amazed, how much you can get out of it.
1. Performance Overview –
If you look at the above pic., you can see a huge spike on 18th July. Something happened on this day which leads to $41,552 in total revenue. Understanding what causes this will help us get more of this. The Revenue, Transactions and Average order value, all these metrics increased compared to previous month except a decrease in conversion rate from 2.99% to 2.82%. Overall the performance is better than the previous month.
% Change in performance by Channel –
If you look at the above picture, you can see that although there is a 41% decrease in new users for Paid Search, the revenue for this channel is actually increased by 23% and there is also a 12% decrease in Bounce Rate (Good) compared to previous month, which is really good. Direct traffic is doing great, not only there is 16% of increase in new user but also there is 75% increase in revenue and is the second highest revenue generating channel for the store. Even though the revenue generated by affiliates is not much, the growth in it is really great, finding which sources are sending these engaged traffic will help us earn more.
Referral traffic generates the highest revenue for this store but there is some decrease in revenue compared to the previous month. The performance of organic also went down by 12%, which is not a good sign. The new user traffic for Display has increased but the there is 77% decrease in revenue which means there is something very wrong and same with the Social, it is also not doing very well.
% Change in Performance by Device Type –
Most of the revenue for the store comes from the Desktop devices and also there is an increase in new users and revenue compared to the previous month, So overall it’s doing good. But the % change in revenue is highest in Mobile and also the number of users has increased, so someone is doing really something good and this definitely needs to be find out so we can do more of it. But the traffic from tablet is not doing very well, even though the new users increased the revenue has decrease around 43% which is not good.
2. Shopping Behavior Report –
The Shopping Behavior Analysis report lets you see the number of sessions that included each stage of your purchase funnel, how many sessions continued from one step to the next, and how many abandoned the funnel at each stage.
If you look at the above report, you will find out out of 78,068 total sessions in July, 80% (62,611) of these sessions results into No Shopping activity and in only 18% of the session, the users viewed the products that you are selling. During each stage of the funnel at least 50% of sessions result in abandonment and at last only 2.75% of the sessions results in Transactions.
One great feature of Enhanced E-commerce is that you can directly create segments from the funnel itself.
Just click on the blue bars or red arrows to create it. You can also apply these segments to other reports in Google Analytics to find more insights.
If you look below the Shopping Behavior funnel report, you can see the default segmented reports by various Dimensions.
Click on the dropdown list to see other dimensions. Let’s change the dimension from user type to Source/medium.
You can see the most good and bad source/medium traffic marked by Green(good) and red(bad) rectangles.
And if you switch to the abandonment tab at the top, you will find out why is this happening. The sources with worst performance has a very high check-out abandonment rate compared to the sources which are performing good.
You can also segment the funnel using advanced segments at the top of the report, here we are looking at the shopping behavior of very engaged traffic for this website.
3. Checkout Behavior Report –
This report gives you insights on how to fix the checkout abandonment rate. It show you where your users are abandoning your checkout process.
We can see that there is a 21% abandonment in the billing and shipping stage. One reason could be that as GMS sell products to worldwide customers, the customers outside the United States don’t want to pay for high shipping cost associated with the product.
You can see the segment view by country to see if is it true?
From the above report, it is clear that the abandonment rate for billing and shipping stage is very low for the United States and Canada but for other countries, the abandonment rate is very high, between 80-90% or sometimes even more than 90%.
You can do similar kind of analysis for other stages too to find out what causing customers to abandon the Checkout process. Look at the other two stages with high abandonment rate.
4. Product List Performance Report –
In Google Analytics, on-site merchandising tools are known as Product List. A product list can be almost anything like the module that lists related products, a category page or on-site search results list. The product list performance report lets you see how well lists and individual products perform in conjunction with one another.
You can see that the “Category List” has the most views than any other list but the CTR is very low. The Search result has the highest CTR. The Most troublesome is the Related Products list, the revenue generated by this list is Null, completely $0. WTH
Let’s see how to optimize these lists.
First, filter the table to include only the category list and apply secondary dimensions to see how the types of products and the order of products presented can influence the success of product lists.
The Top 5 Product positions in the Category list has the highest CTR most likely because they are more visible to the users but after position 5, the positions with best CTR started to decrease as we go down the list.
One thing we can do to increase revenue is move the most valuable products to the top of the list.
To understand which products are performing worst at what position, we can apply advanced segments.
The above report shows products included in the category list. Out of top 10 products with most views in the list, 9s are related to the Youtube brand and they are still performing very poorly.
And if you sort the report from highest to lowest revenue, you will see that the highest amount of revenue is generated from the Nest Family products but compared to the number of times these products appeared in the list is way too lower than the youtube products.
Promoting more of the Nest products or products with high revenue and CTR can significantly improve the list performance as well as more sales for The GMS.
Now let’s look at how a single product performs, depending on the list it’s in.
Go to the product primary dimension at the top and sort the table by product list clicks to see which products are getting most clicks when appeared in a list.
Now apply the product list name as secondary dimension after clicking on a product.
You can see that “Google Men’s vintage badge tee black” is performing very poorly in both the category and search results list. Products are added to the cart but due to some reasons, customers are not completing the purchase.
Due to (Not set) we can’t able to know in which list it is converting well but we can see that 111 unique purchases have happened compared to zero in category and search results list.
You can also add other secondary dimensions like product color, size etc. available at top of the report.
5. Product Performance Report-
The Product performance report lets you evaluate the performance of individual products. It provides information such as revenue generated by a product, quantity sold, how often they were added to the cart and removed from the cart and whether they were eventually purchased etc.
Cart-to-detail rate – The cart-to-detail rate shows how often customers that viewed a product added it to their cart.
Buy-to-detail rate – The Buy-to-detail rate shows how often customers that viewed a product ended up purchasing it.
Products that generate the highest Revenue –
More than half of the total revenue(56%) is coming from the Nest products. You can also see that customers are buying”Google baby essential set” on an average 13 per transactions and it has the highest cart-to-detail rate among all the top 10 products indicating a high fondness for this product.
The Hard cover journals are also generating a good amount of revenue and also have the highest average quantity among all but it has a very poor cart-to-detail and buy-to-detail rate.
Later, in this post, I will show you how to optimize your website with some advanced tools.
Products added then removed from the cart –
First, go to the shopping behavior tab at the top of the Product performance report and sort the report from high to low.
Look for any products that have the high add to cart and removed from cart number. Also, compare the cart-to-detail and buy-to-detail rate to find some issues if not clear from the above analysis. Look at the rows with red squares, how they highlighting potential issues quickly. You can also filter the report by an advanced filter with any criteria if you have huge numbers of products.
Products with high and low cart-to-detail and buy-to-detail rate –
You can sort both the metric from high to low and low to high to find insights. Some of the Good performing products are number 3,5,6,7. But if you look closely at the above report, you can also see a big problem. Although all these products have a very high cart-to-detail rate but some of the products in the report has very few unique purchases. Not an efficient way to increase the sales faster.
And if you again sort the report from low to high, You can see the same problem here, very low number of unique purchases.
One of the best ways to effectively get out of this problem is using Weighted sort. But I don’t know why weighted sort option is not available in the product performance report.
But don’t worry there is one another way you can use to find products that are performing good or bad.
Compared to site average report tab in GA –
The best thing about using this feature is that you don’t have to use your head too much. All you have to do is just look at the report. Green means good, red means bad. You can see that hard cover journals have a very low cart-to-detail rate compared to the site average. Another great thing is you can change another available metrics from the drop-down menu and compare them together.
Using Advanced Segments –
Just look at the % product revenue number on the top of the report for organic, Paid and referral traffic. About 70% of the revenue is coming from only referral traffic. For organic and paid, it’s 9% and 2% respectively. Referral traffic accounts for 14% of the users whereas organic traffic accounts for 52% of the users, still referral traffic generating way more revenue than organic. Also look at the trend lines to compare them over the time period you have selected.
You can also see lots of other metrics. Look at the Cart-to-detail and buy-to-detail rate for organic traffic, it is performing very poorly compared to the other two segment.
And if you scroll a lit bit lower, you can see the performance of each product for every segment individually. Compare their performance and see which products are performing best in which channel.
Want more amazing insights, look at the other reports in Google Analytics with segmentation applied or since we have seen that organic traffic is performing very poorly, remove the other two segments and look at the keyword report or Landing page report for Organic traffic only. You can find so many great insights for optimization.
Product Category Performance –
You can also analyze by product categories like which categories are driving more revenue or on average, how much products customers buy from each category, what is their average price? etc.
6. Internal Promotions –
Product marketing you do on your own website to drive sales like banner ads etc.
Note – This report is of May 2016. There isn’t enough data for the July 2017 to explain this report.
The Lifestyle, New, and Fun internal promotions have the most views but the CTR for these campaigns are very low indicating poor customer Appeal. But Apparel, Accessories, and Office campaigns are doing a good job of enticing the customers to click and convert.
It is clear from the above report that Campaigns 4,5,6 need to be promoted more frequently and campaigns 1,2,3 need some further investigation to know why is it performing so poorly.
Using the device type segment can also be very useful to understand customers behavior.
As the segments indicate that customers tend to click on internal promotions more from Mobile & Tablet traffic than Desktop but may be Convert later on the desktop as the number of transactions and revenue are more for desktop traffic.
Another great way to find insights is to use the Pivot table feature in Google Analytics.
In the above report I am pivoting the result by Internal promotion and Paid Search campaigns to see the number of transactions each paid search campaigns generates for each of the internal promotions.
Another example –
7. Internal Site Search-
Very few people use the internal site search report in google analytics but it is a very powerful feature in two ways.
First, it helps you understand what your customers are looking for once they visited your website and what was the result of that search. They they bought the products that they search for or left the website without purchasing it.
Search terms are queries the customers are typing on your website’s search bar. Customers during July had search “gopher” 47 times at least once during a session. And % of search exits is basically equivalent to “Bounce Rate” here.
And if you look at the E-commerce tab, you can see that none of the search terms results in any conversions, which is very bad. Let’s focus on the “gopher” and try to understand more about it.
Where do people begin to search for a particular term?
Which pages customers saw after performing a search?
As we can see that customers are visiting lots of pages after searching for it and they aren’t converting as we saw earlier.
Some possible reasons could be that they are not getting what they are looking for or the price of these products is higher than they expected or something else.
And if you do a search on the website, It is clear that GMS isn’t selling this product or it is out of stock.
Upon some more digging, it is clear that actually most of the customers are coming from Quora to purchase this product.
Although the number of searches for it is low but every time someone looking for it, GMS is losing money right away.
One another great thing about Internal site search is you can use these search terms in your PPC ads or in SEO to increase sales and rank higher in the search result when someone searches on Google, Bing etc.
Bonus Section –
8. Tools for Conversion rate optimization –
a. Page analytics (by Google) –
Page analytics allows you to visually see how customers interact with your website. What products or links they are clicking on or not clicking on. It helps you to optimize your website and improve the user experience.
Click the link to know more – Page Analytics
b. HotJar –
Hotjar is one of my most favorite tool for Conversion Rate Optimization. It has lots of great features. Some of these are –
Heatmaps-
It helps you visually see what your customers cares more, where they are clicking on the website or not. You can also see the report by device type.
Visitor recording –
Visitor recording feature eliminates guesswork by recording videos of real visitors and help you find any usability issues on your website faster.
Conversion funnels and Form analysis –
Feedback poll and survey –
C. User Testing –
User Testing is one of the most advanced websites usability testing tool. You can create a specific task for people to complete on your website, Mobile Apps or Prototypes, while people speaking their thoughts as they use it with video and audio recording. You can also do live conversations with the consumers to find insights faster. With User Testing, you get access to over one million target audience and can get feedback within 1-2 hours.
Look at this demo video to learn more about – User Testing
D. Five Second Test by UsabilityHub –
The idea behind this is that usabilityhub show your homepage, landing page or any part of the website that they are interested to optimize to the users for only five seconds and they are the users to remember and answer questions like – what this website do? What do you like and dislike about this design? etc.
They do lots of other amazing things, you can check them out here – UsabilityHub
E. A/B Testing with VWO –
Visual Website optimizer helps marketers with no knowledge of coding to run A/B Tests on their websites. It also includes lots of additional capabilities of personalization, segmentation, and targeting. VWO provides more than 100+ features with lots of resources to learn and apply it on your website.
Using Social-Proof to increase sales –
F. Yotpo –
Yotpo is a very powerful tools to collect customers photos, review, Q&A and more. It helps you to increase your website SEO ranking with Seller ratings and product listing ads. It also creates a shoppable version of your Instagram and Pinterest feed, which seamlessly sends shoppers directly from your Instagram photos to tagged product pages.
Expected increase in sales (GMS)-
G. Referral candy –
Referral candy is a referral marketing tool that helps you to get more customers by incentivizing referral to increase word of mouth of your company. One of the great examples of a company that leveraged Word-of-mouth is Dropbox.
With Referral, Dropbox went from 100 k to 4 million users in 15 months, which put the company at a valuation of 10 Billion dollars.
Expected RIO (GMS)-
H. Mobile Speed Test (by Google) –
Use Mobile speed test to fix issues with your website loading time on mobile to reduce customers abandonment.
Let’s use Mobile speed to test GMS.
The great thing about using this tool is that it tells you, on average how much time your website takes to load on a mobile device, the estimated visitor loss due to slow speed, how your website performance against the top performing websites in your Industry.
You can see from the above test that GMS website takes nearly 7s to load on mobile and it is slower than other top performing sites in this category. Due to loading speed issue, GMS is probably losing 26% of all visitors on mobile, Which is a big number.
Why lose these customers when you can fix it with little efforts.
To test your website, use this link – Mobile speed test
For a more advanced test, use this link – Page Speed test on Mobile and desktop.
That’s it for today. Please let me know in the comment section, what do you like and dislike about this post. What steps do you take to increase sales on your website?