Google Analytics - Spotting Conversion Opportunities

In this article I would like to continue sharing my experience and learnings during the second week of studying Digital Analytics Mini-degree at CXL Institute. If you are interested in browsing through my learnings over the first week, you can do so here.

During this week, I managed to complete a deeper dive into the world of analytics by going through the course of Google Analytics (GA) - finding conversion opportunities. The course was taught by Analytics expert Jeff Sauer explains how to identify conversion opportunities via digital analytics. Jeff is the founder of Jeffalytics and PPCcourse.com

Digital Analytics is a vast topic. Before thinking about advanced capabilities of a tool, it’s important to understand the big picture of how to use different analytics tools in the measurement marketing cycle, find conversion optimizations opportunities and how different analytics platforms provide different views of data to play with. In this article I will discuss with the help of course learnings, how to start navigating through GA and how to extract meaningful opportunities.

GA - finding conversion opportunities

To start off, I would like to share the demo GA account which google provides as a constructive entry point into their product. Thankfully, the demo account is a fully functional GA account that any google user can access. It's a great way to look at real business data and experiment with GA features.

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/demoAccount // GA demo account

During this course I learned how undervalued some metrics can be when analyzing reports and how some metrics having higher or lower values may have a negative connotation associated with them.

One of the most essential ways to dredge up an opportunity is to look at the Source Medium report in the Acquisition section (as shown below). The conversion rate (CR) metric can tell you a lot here, for example, a page with a high conversion rate does not establish the importance of the page rather gives a sense of the traffic quality. A traffic of high quality will convert better and depending on the source it usually means the marketing efforts performed by you in terms of targeting, relevance of content and landing page structure are working seamlessly. Another important thing that I would like to emphasize upon here is that don't look at average conversion rates, if reports are analyzed on the performance of averages then the room to drill down and find potential opportunities for improvement diminishes.

If you take a look at the YouTube/referral traffic source in the image below, you will see that YouTube is the 3rd biggest traffic source but has the lowest CR%. You may ask yourself whether this is a conversion optimization opportunity or you need to reevaluate the targeting altogether.

Another metric that is commonly undervalued is the page value. The page value metric is found in the All Pages report in the GA Behaviour section and shows how much a page contributes to the overall value of the website. Let's consider the third entry in the table below, The page value of $2.05 basically means for every single person who visits this page, the google merchandise store makes $2.05. This indicates that if you are doing PPC ads, you can spend slightly lower than this cost to turn up a profit. In the table below a conversion opportunity can be clearly seen, that is if we look at the 8th entry in the report below, it can be observed that men’s apparel page has high traffic but lower page value. We can drill down on this observation and find out any structural or technical issues with the page, maybe the CTA link is broken or maybe there is a problem with incoming traffic? In this way we can filter pages that are undervalued and find out ways we can make them perform as the pages with high page values. I later included sou re/medium as a secondary dimension in this report to find out which traffic channel may be responsible for the low page values and observed that the traffic coming on to he homepage via YouTube had no conversions and page value indicating that maybe the incoming visitors from YouTube do not prefer generic landing page and may need some specific product landing page.

Let's talk about the famous bounce rate (BR%). A big learning from this course was that when it comes to BR many people think that a high bounce rate is bad and although that's true for most cases, it really depends on the context of the business. BR is not inherently good or bad. For example, if a landing page has only one option for the visitor to choose from, only one CTA and no links to navigate elsewhere, the BR% for that page is probably going to be very high, let's take a landing page where visitors have nothing to do except fill a form. 100 people visit, 90 of them bounce and 10 of them convert, that's a 90% BR and a 10% CR. Ask around, that's a solid CR. As a thumb rule one should keep working to lower the BR however there is no need to feel alarmed in case of a high BR until you consider the page’s context.

Along with all the aforementioned reports, I used the following additional GA reports to dig out opportunities and carry out basic analysis:

1) Behavior > Site Search > Usage

Questions to drill down upon?

• Are a very high or very low percentage of visits using site search? A high percentage here could indicate that the website is difficult to use.
• Do sessions with search convert at a higher rate?

2) Audience > Mobile > Overview : This data is essential for determining which devices are leading to your highest conversion rates and revenue generation. I found out that we had a higher amount of traffic on mobile but lower CR as compared to desktop. Directly spotted some element based responsiveness issues and the need for mobile page load times optimization using additional reports.

3) Compare segments of mobile and desktop traffic

I found out that mobile traffic generated a low page value which points to the fact mobile traffic does not contribute much to the overall. I went one step ahead of and used source/medium as a secondary dimension and observed that the traffic incoming from google / cpc drove a lower page value to mobile as compared to desktop.

Questions to drill down upon?

• Carry out a technical audit for mobile pages for their load times and responsiveness. 
• Is there an issue with the kind of audience that comes through mobile?
• Should I decrease routing traffic through paid marketing channels to mobile?

To summarize the learnings from this course, In order to spot conversion opportunities Jeff suggests to start finding reports that answer the following questions:

- How user arrives at your site 

- Where user lands 

- Structure of landing page

- Each step of the purchase funnel

- Identifying cart problems

In conclusion, one should always approach analytics with a problem statement.: We need to know in advance what we want to know and what would be changed based on the answer. If nothing, then don’t make it a priority.

Click here to download a vastly comprehensive guide on how to recognize conversion optimization opportunities by ConversionXL.