It’s surprising how a lot of big companies ask their digital marketing partners: How can we boost our e-commerce conversion rates? and then in the same breath, say they have nothing to do with Google Analytics at all.

Google Analytics is a powerful ally in increasing your conversion rate. Whether you are running an online store and want to better understand the target audience to grow your sales, or you own a small business where your main goal is to gather as many leads as possible, Google Analytics can provide you with all the insight you need to discover how you can improve your odds and succeed.

Here Buzz Interactive, a premier SEO agency, has highlighted how online businesses can use Google Analytics to their advantage.

1. Analyze Your Web Page Performances

Analyzing your web page performances helps you determine what your potential buyers are most engaged with on your website. You can break down engagement metrics and determine which pages are getting traffic in high numbers as well as your top exit and landing pages. Just go to:

Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages

The landing pages report will provide the data for specific pages, which will help you examine your web pages’ performances. Analyze the user metrics for each web page. The report will also include the bounce rate, average session duration, pages visited per session, and conversions or e-commerce transactions.

The bounce rate reflects that someone landed on your site and left right away without visiting any other pages. Why? Well, the visitors didn’t find any relevant information to their search query, so they left without clicking any options. But, bear in mind that bounce rate and Exit Rate are two different things. Exit rate refers to visitors who click away to a different website from a specific web page of your site. while bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions.

However, both bounce rate and exit rate play a vital role in Google determining the overall ranking of a website. By identifying the pages that have high bounce rates and high traffic, you can fix the User Experience Design or content of the web page. It will empower you to keep the visitors on your website, in case, your digital marketing agency fails to do its job.

2. Get the Gist of Shopping Behavior

Understand what is stopping your potential buyers from making the purchase without seeking any help from your SEO agency. You probably want to investigate this when you find out one of your product or service that has had over 10 unique purchases this time last year, now has seen only one unique purchase. To identify the problem, you need to access the Shopping Behavior sections of Product Performance in Google Analytics.

View products or services with a low cart to detail rate or buy to detail rate. Wondering, what does it mean? It reflects that your product or service pages are getting views regularly, but they aren’t being purchased or added to the cart.

There could be several reasons behind it. For instance:

• Your product or service price could be way higher than your competition.

• You haven’t described the product or service as well as other things listed on your site.

• There aren’t any reviews of your product or service.

• It could be that product is frequently out of stock.

• In case, you are advertising your product or service, it could be possible the prices on the ads and prices on the site do not match.

• Or you are just overpromising in your advertisements .i.e. claiming that there is a 50% discount but actually you are offering only a 30% discount.

3. Get Goal Reports & Track Conversions

Page views and traffic are good but to give yourself a fighting chance you need a website with engaged users. More importantly, you need solid conversions. Setting up new goals in analytics can gravely help track conversions if you don’t want to bank on your SEO agency. With this report, you can instantly figure out which marketing activities are working for you .i.e. generating new leads, product sales or sale inquiries.

Solely considering the overall conversion rate of your website isn’t going to help much. You need to find out what’s contributing to it and whether or not it’s hitting the potential.

Online business owners can start by creating a basic goal in Analytics. For instance, if someone signs up for a free trial on their website, they could create a Destination goal with the URL of their Thank You page. It will record all the successful opt-ins.

Now access the conversions report to view Goal Completions by Source / Medium and find out which channels are sending you the most conversions. It will reveal to you which marketing activities are contributing the most. But, make sure to watch out for a tricky pitfall; conversions coming from (direct) / (none).

Technically speaking, direct traffic is when visitors directly type your website address into their URL bar. However, in reality, dark traffic take over other sources of tracking and lump them under direct traffic. For instance, Google is now compelling all webmasters to add secure search to their websites with an SSL certificate.

By and large, this is a good thing! It proves useful to ‘lock down’ sites from someone who is maliciously prying on your web session. But, most analytics packages fail to attribute redirected traffic like sending visitors to hit your HTTP domain to the new, updated HTTPS version.

Even though you are redirecting them from email or social channels, the redirect will kill the digital paper trail. As a result, these conversions show up as direct ones rather depicting the real source they originally came from.

We hope that by reviewing the aforementioned reasons and examining your web pages with analytical data, you can make the necessary changes and boost your cart conversion rate.