Google Analytics is an amazing tool but sometimes there’s too much information. How do you make sense of it all?
I’ve been working on the Google Adwords account for a client whose site went live a month ago. Their keywords are hugely competitive and budget is tight – no room for mistakes. That’s why they were using us.
In the first week of July, they’d got 800+ visits at a cost of £108. Bounce rate was running at 21% and the average time per visit was over 2 minutes. Click-through-rate (CTR) also OK at 5%. Looking good.
Still, no-one was buying anything.
Our first issue was site design. Sadly, we don’t always have control over the actual site – their layout was badly structured and text difficult to read (both colour and size). The cart was confusing and even we couldn’t work out how to checkout…
A few long emails to the web designer later, we were getting there. Not perfect, just closer.
We use Google Analytics everyday and there’s a lot to take in. Where do you start? You need to work out what you actually need first. For this site, navigation was most important. What were the customers clicking on, where were they going?
I thought it would be a good idea to brush up on the Google Navigation Summary report as I’ve always found it confusing…
There’s an excellent article here that explains it in more detail:
http://seo.blogs.webucator.com/2010/07/07/how-to-use-the-google-analytics-navigation-summary-report/
I was starting to realise that our buyers were going round in circles. They were never clicking the actual products.
How are we going to make them buy something?
- Clutter – remove as much clutter and text from the site as possible.
- Consolidate – try and write shorter, snappier sentences.
- Call to action – ‘Click here’ always works.
- Your Important aspects – most people don’t scroll down. Place important things at the top.
- Don’t assume – give them some choice, especially on the landing pages, you don’t know what they want, they do.
- Blinded by choice – remove unnecessary products and experiment.
- Make product images bigger – fancy jquery rollovers are nice but customers want to see large images.
- Streamline your checkout – again, make it simple.
I’ll let you know how they get on in a week or so when they’ve made these changes.