04 Jul
Article content
Jokes aside!
Using Google Analytics data to increase conversions for boutiques and stores and grow your online sales is a process that doesn't happen overnight. It all starts with understanding the data and traffic patterns so you can test strategies to attract new traffic and online conversions. To understand, how to increase sales of a boutique or store in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and other CIS countries in terms of traffic, let's talk about the number one tool that you should be using to understand online traffic patterns - the Google Analytics.
What is Google Analytics?
Using Google Analytics data to increase conversions for boutiques and stores is a free digital analytics platform connected to your domain that allows you to track and analyze traffic and behavior patterns on your website pages. It gives you the ability to track traffic statistics, acquisition, behavior, conversions and site performance from anywhere in the world.
Why it's important.
Many say that only trackable numbers grow, so how do you know if the marketing changes you make on a daily basis will directly impact your sales? Google Analytics gives you the daily data you need to make informed decisions about your marketing. It allows you to understand your website conversion rates, traffic spikes from events and sources, most visited pages, and conversions from various sources that you can use for marketing.
How do I use Google Analytics?
Google Analytics doesn't increase your traffic for you, it provides you with data to see if the changes you make to your website or marketing plans are affecting your sales and conversions.
The first and easiest way to look at this is the conversion rate, which is the number of sales you get in a certain period of time divided by the traffic in the same period. The average ecommerce conversion rates are around 5i percent of traffic. That's pretty low, right? That's why we know that even small changes in your business can make a big difference in conversion rates.
Another way to use this data for growth is to examine your engagement channels. These are the sources of traffic to your website, whether it's external blogs, websites, social channels, or links that you track with referral tags. This allows you to focus your efforts on the channels with the highest conversion rates.
This data also gives you a glimpse into your customer's experience on the site, showing you the most viewed pages, categories and products. This gives you the knowledge to know what to promote, remove or resell.
What key metrics should be honed?
- Unique visitors: how many unique visitors (individuals) have visited your store in X amount of time.
- Pageviews: how many pages did this group of visitors view?
- Bounce rate: what percentage of people actually dug into the content on my site, and who immediately left knowing I wasn't a good fit for them?
- Time spent: what is the average time spent on my site by one visitor? (The longer the better)
- Acquisition: where did my traffic come from?
- Behavior: what pages did they view?
- Goals: how many visitors and from what sources made a conversion to achieve the goal I've defined as a conversion, and what is the value of that specified goal?
How do changes to the website affect my conversions?
This is where the beauty of Google Analytics and even the more advanced split testing and heat map analysis programs become so useful. Things like changing your favorite categories on your site's homepage or rebranding with new photos can make a HUGE difference in your online conversion rate. But if you don't know where you are now, you're just throwing a noodle at the wall and hoping it sticks.