We all know there’s mountains of data out there that even the best team can’t sort through. Google Analytics is a great tool for scouring through this data and figuring out what it means. The issue is that many people have no clue where to even start with all of their data to make optimization easier for both marketers and owners of websites. Many data scientists now use machine learning to process their data, but there are other ways as well.
You don’t need robots to do this for you- you can do it yourself quite easily. We’ll go through the strategy here- it will help you get actionable data that can increase conversion, AOV, and other metrics.
You want to, first off, ignore your high level data. Revenue, AOV, and conversion rate don’t mean anything to you unless you want to measure your overall growth. When making your website better, high level data means nothing to you.
Segmenting your traffic is super important here. Decide how you want to segment your traffic so you can make website enhancements specifically for your chosen demographics. For newbies, we suggest looking at direct traffic (when people type your URL into a search bar to find your site, likely meaning they heard of you from another source.) Segmenting traffic will help you immensely in the optimization process.
Next you’ll want to funnel your segmented traffic. You want to track where your dropoffs are, which will be the main benchmark here. If you’re focusing on direct traffic, people are starting off at your homepage and then likely browsing through your site to get to a product page. At the product page, only a small percentage will actually end up adding an item to cart and buying it. You must establish continue rates for each part of your site so you have numbers to beat.
As a side note, make sure you’re using clean data, and a data range that won’t skew your data. Be mindful of your conversion and AOV- check that they are consistent.
Before you add enhancements to your site, it’s natural for your benchmark to be lower than you want it to be. Use this benchmark as a guide for what your goals are, and enhance accordingly. Don’t pay attention to other sites- only yours matters here. Try to beat yourself!
You’ll want to engage in visitor replay. Watching your users go through your website and seeing how they interact with it live can be so, so helpful in figuring out what you can fix about your website. Install a program like Inspectlet, log in, and you can watch your visitors. Starting from the homepage, you can see where visitors go first, and whether or not they end up adding anything to their cart.
The next step is feedback. Feedback is a direct way to ask your customers what they think you can improve upon. Don’t use annoying popups that ask users for their input- many visitors will outright ignore these. A footer button can be great, saying something like “submit feedback” or “what can we improve?”
When a visitor clicks on these buttons, they should be led to a modal that asks them how the website could be made better for them. This form functionality is easy to make, but you can also use a third party app if you so choose.
Content is everywhere nowadays, and visitors know what they want and what they don’t. Pay attention to their responses and make sure to watch via visitor replay how they came to those responses. Both will help you make your site the best it can be.
These are only a few ideas on how to optimize your site, but they sure do help. Asking users what they want and tracking how they interact with your site can greatly enhance your website’s layout and functionality. You can also always try A/B testing for light changes- for bigger changes, it’s better to just release it and then compare it to your first benchmarks. Happy optimizing!
