How to Use Google Analytics for Online Store
Google Analytics is a powerful tool to understand the behavior of your visitors. It provides you with essential information to help you identify your visitors and how they interact with your online store. With Google Analytics you can find out what interests your visitors to improve your marketing efforts and increase e-commerce sales.
Today I’ll share six ways to use Google Analytics to improve marketing efforts and develop effective marketing strategies.
1. Analyzing Keywords
With Google analytics you can easily understand what keywords users type into search engines that lead them to your store. By analyzing the keyword results, you can optimize the content of e-commerce site to attract more traffic and improve product descriptions.
Go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic
2. Understand engagement with Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of your visitors who arrive on your online shop and then left without visiting additional pages. For an e-commerce site, engagement is crucial, so you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible. Try including convincing call to action phrases on your site to keep visitors searching. Also, make sure your SEO efforts are aligned with the content of your e-commerce site as this often determines your bounce rate.
Go to Audience > Overview
3. Mobile Friendly
Google analytics also allows you to gain an understanding of the devices visitors used to surf your online store. You can find out the percentage of visits from mobile devices including smart phones and tablets. If there is a significant number of traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s a good idea to integrate a responsive theme to make your e-commerce shop mobile friendly and as a result, increase sales.
Go to Audience > Google Mobile > Overview
4. When are visitors leaving?
Exit pages lets you know the last page a visitors views before exiting your e-commerce store. This is a good way to understand pages on your online shop that need improvement. The page might be confusing or disengaging which means your marketing efforts should be focused on those pages.
Go to Content > Site Content > Exit Pages
5. Social Network Traffic
Discover the impact social networks have on the traffic of your online store. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google – which one generates the most traffic for your shop? This is a good way to measure your social media efforts and understand which social networks need content improvements. You will also see which social networks work better than others to help you allocate your marketing efforts effectively.
Go to Traffic Sources > Social > Overview
6. In-page Analytics
With in-page analytics you’ll gain knowledge on the effectiveness of different elements of your most visited pages. Google Analytics will show a screen shot of your page and give you a percentage of the engagement on links, buttons, icons and/or pictures throughout the page. This is a great visual to thoroughly understand how visitors are interacting with your online store.
Go to Content > In-Page Analytics
Google Analytics gives you precise information about the behavior of your visitors and helps you strategize your e-commerce marketing efforts effectively. Decide which criteria you will monitor actively and use the data to increase engagement, traffic and sales.
