10 Google Analytics Reports that Show Where Your Store Loses Visitors

This post covers how to use Google Analytics to analyze the flow of visitors through an ecommerce site – from landing to conversions, such as purchases or email signups. It is important to identify trouble spots in your sales funnel and to take the necessary steps to make improvements or eliminate the problems.

1. Funnel Flow – Visualization and Drop-off rate

The first place to have a quick glimpse for any potential issues is the funnel visualization report, at Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualization. This Google Analytics report shows the volume of traffic drop-offs at each step of your funnel. For example, here’s a 5-step funnel.

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The funnel visualization report shows the volume of traffic drop-offs at each step.

Looking at the above funnel, note that there are drop-offs at each step of this checkout funnel. However, notice that the first step (“Delivery Info”) has the lowest percentage — 66.30 percent — of users proceeding to the next step. It is the biggest drop-off trouble spot and would likely be the first area that would need to be addressed for user experience improvements. Viewing heatmaps of this specific page with your web design and UX team could help isolate the cause(s).

2. Shopping Behavior Analysis

The next place to review (if Enhanced Ecommerce tracking is set up on your site) is the Shopping Behavior Analysis report, which is in the “Conversions” section of Google Analytics reporting.

The Shopping Behavior Analysis report reveals the number of sessions at each stage of your sales funnel, how many sessions moved from one step to the next, and how many visitors abandoned the funnel at each stage. The red arrow at the bottom of each step indicates abandonment values by session and relative percentage — i.e., users drop-offs in the same session. Look for the arrows with the highest percentage points to identify the lowest conversion pages.

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The Shopping Behavior Analysis report reveals the number of sessions at each stage of your sales funnel, how many sessions moved from one step to the next, and how many visitors abandoned the funnel at each stage.

From the screenshot above, we can see that 83.03 percent of users with shopping activity (have viewed a product, product details, promotions) do not add to cart. This is definitely an area to look into and consider different options to improve. Likely questions to ask are “Is the ‘Add to Cart’ button visible enough for users?” and “Are there specific categories of products affected or is this a site-wide trend?”

3. Checkout Behavior Analysis

Then, under Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking, go to Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Analysis > Checkout Behavior Analysis. This report further drills down into the funnel by revealing how users have moved through the checkout process specifically. It will help track how many users have moved on from one checkout step to the next, and how many abandoned the process at each step.

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The Checkout Behavior Analysis report reveals how users have moved through the checkout process specifically.

The above screenshot shows that 49.56 percent of users that submitted their payment information dropped off after reviewing their order. Something is definitely up here and not going too well at this stage of checkout. User testing could help to figure this issue out and make the necessary changes.

4. Conversion Rate and Drop-off Rate, per Device Type

Now for the low hanging fruit. You want to see conversion rate discrepancies between devices, at Audience > Mobile > Overview. Broadly speaking, tablets should convert similar to desktops (actually, tablets typically convert 10 percent less than desktops), but smartphones convert on average at one-third to one-quarter of the rate of traditional or tablet devices (but total mobile sales are on the way up since people have more smartphones with bigger screens).

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See conversion rate discrepancies between devices, at Audience > Mobile > Overview.

From the above example, conversion rates on mobile devices are almost five times less than for desktop users. (See on far right: .60 percent for desktop versus .13 percent for mobile.) This is lower than normal. To find out what is not working and needs to be improved, carry out user testing, run tests on different mobile devices, and further drill down conversions by mobile device.

Importantly, remember that roughly 90 percent of users switch between devices to complete a goal. There’s therefore a strong chance that customers are visiting your website on their smartphone and then completing the transaction on a desktop or tablet.

5. Conversion and Bounce Rate per Screen Resolution

Comparing bounce rate and conversion rate per screen resolution can give hints about web design problems.

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Users with lower screen resolutions often have lower conversion rates.

The above report — Audience > Technology > Browsers & OS and then change the Primary Dimension, on the top right, to “Screen Resolution” — shows us that users with lower screen resolutions have lower conversion rates as compared to high screen resolution users. It could mean either that high screen resolution users have simply more money and are more likely to convert or that user experience on low-resolution devices needs to be improved — or both.

6. Conversion Rate and Drop-off Rate per Browser

One of the most common reasons for conversion drops would be the incompatibility of a site with some (even major) browsers.

For example, look at the conversion rates per browser and browser version in this screenshot below, which is at: Audience > Technology > Browsers & OS and then add the Secondary Dimension “Browser Version.”

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A common reason for conversion drops is the incompatibility of a site with various web browsers.

First, look at the above report by device category separately. So the view should be desktop only, tablet only, or mobile only.

Second, what can we learn from the above report? Internet Explorer 11.0 converts at 3.23 percent while version 8.0 is 0.66 percent; version 9.0 is 0.67 percent; and version 7.0 is 0.22 percent. Ask your tech team to look into the user experience on IE 8.0 and 9.0 for desktop devices. Apply the same logic to other browsers and their versions.

7. Bounce Rate per Landing Page

Now, let’s consider landing pages by going to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. If you drive paid traffic to your site, this is especially critical — look at the “paid traffic” segment separately.

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Analyzing traffic to landing pages helps determine which ones have a higher-than-average bounce rate and low conversion rates.

Which (high-traffic) landing pages have higher-than-average bounce rates and a low conversion rates? These two metrics usually correlate.

Once you can separate the top performers from sub-optimal ones, take action to:

• Either fix issues on the identified pages or fix the quality of your traffic source(s);
• Stop sending traffic to the affected pages — instead send traffic to the high-performing pages.

8. Exit Rate per Page

This is very similar to bounce rate by landing page. Look for the pages with a higher-than-average exit rate — i.e., the percentage of users that leave the site from that page. To view the Exit Rate per Page report, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages; change your chart type from “Data” to “Performance” and then chose the dropdown option “Exit” on the second column.

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Look for pages with higher-than-average exit rates.

This is a nice, single-glance view to identify under-performing pages. Compare high-performing pages to under-performing ones, and see if you can determine the differences.

9. Page Load Time

Site speed matters. Some pages on your site will be inevitably slower than others. Find out by looking at Behavior > Site Speed > Page Timings.

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View the download speed of any and all pages on your site, at Behavior > Site Speed > Page Timings.

Isolate pages with above than average page load time and have your developers work on decreasing page load times.

10. Conversion Rate per Product

Another place to look for useful information is the Ecommerce > Product Performance report.
Find out the products that have a below average “buy-to-detail” rate. (Google Analytics now calls a “product page” a “detail page.” The buy-to-detail rate is the total unique purchases of a product divided by the product-detail page views.)

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Buy-to-detail rate equals unique purchases divided by views of product-detail pages.

Carry out user testing to learn about the issues that your customers may have when viewing products with a low buy-to-detail rate. Compare these products to products that convert well, to determine changes.

Conclusion

Before you carry out any testing on your site, be sure to look at all the data from Google Analytics to identify potential problems pages or sections, which can cost you conversions and sales.

Remember, data doesn’t tell you what to do. It’s your job to pull insights out of the data you see. Fixing the problems always starts with finding where they are located. Once you know that, you’re one huge step closer to coming up with split tests that might make a difference, to make more money.

If you liked this article you may also like:

Google Analytics Tutorial For Beginners 

Using Analytical Analysis To Help Improve Conversions 

A Beginners Guide To Website Analytics

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How to Track Marketing Campaigns with Google Analytics

When it comes to tracking online success, Google Analytics is really good at doing that and it can help you get insights from your data.

All you have to do is just make sure that you use the proper metrics to measure the outcomes and not look at plain data. The secret is to check the outcomes from the data you have available.

If you are not sure how to do it, don’t worry, by the time you will finish reading this article, you will be able to easily apply my advice for your data.

When I say tracking online marketing campaigns, I am referring at a promotion for your eBook, at your latest newsletter, a tweet which promotes an article or your affiliate link shared on Facebook.

You can also track:

• Facebook advertising campaigns
• AdWords campaigns
• LinkedIn ad campaigns
• Microsoft adCenter campaigns

All these can be tracked and measured with Google Analytics, so you can see the performance of your online marketing campaigns.

Once you have data in Google Analytics (GA), you can see the conversion rate for different sources and mediums, check which campaign performs better and where you should put your efforts next time.

To do that, you need to tag your campaigns. Actually you need to tag the URLs that you will be using.

Tag Campign ULs

That’s a really easy and straight forward process and you can use the URL Builder tool from Google to do it. From that page you can easily build the URLs which you can later share on different mediums (email, ppc, referrals).

To make it easier for you to understand, I will use this tool to build an URL for this article, which I will share with my subscribers in the next newsletter.

First, you need to enter the URL that you want to promote.

Then, there are 3 mandatory fields that you need to fill out when building your campaign URL, fields that contain information which Google Analytics will gather and display in the reports:

• Campaign Source – this field is used to identify the source where the traffic is coming from. It can be: google, twitter, facebook, newsletter or a referral name.
• Campaign Medium – this field is used to identify the medium used by your visitors: organic, ppc, email, referral, friend etc.
• Campaign Name – this field should contain an easily identifiable name for your campaign.

Campaign Term and Campaign Content are optional and they are mainly used in AdWords and A/B testing.

Once you fill all the fields, just press the [Generate URL] button and you will get the URL which you can use in your marketing campaign.

Additionally, you can use a service like bit.ly to shorten the URL and hide those campaign parameters.

For my example, the main url is http://www.eugenoprea.com/google-analytics-campaign-tracking/ and here’s what I will use on each of the mandatory fields:

• Campaign Source – [Eugen Oprea - Free Updates] (this is the name of my newsletter)
• Campaign Medium – email (this is the medium used)
• Campaign Name – GACampaignTracking (an easily identifiable name)

The final URL is this one: http://www.eugenoprea.com/google-analytics-campaign-tracking/?utm_source=%5BEugen%2BOprea%2B-%2BFree%2BUpdates%5D&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=GACampaignTracking

As you can see towards the end of the URL, is better to use only letters & numbers, so avoid using special characters and white spaces.

Check the Google Analytics Campaigns Reports

Based on the data above, here’s how the final result will look like:

Now, once I have some data into my Google Analytics account I will be able to see how many visitors landed on this articles from my campaign and analyze different metrics based on that.

To access the [Campaigns] reports in Google Analytics, go to [Traffic Sources] > [Sources] > [Campaigns].

There you will be able to see how visitors that are coming from that campaign behave on your site and also analyze your conversion rates based on those campaigns.

All these details will help you better understand what are your most successful online marketing campaigns and where you should focus next time.

If you are not leveraging marketing campaigns, click here to get started. Kristi Hines (Kikolani), just launched the 2nd edition of her eBook “Blog Post Promotion: The Ultimate Guide” where she shares advice on how to promote your content.

You will learn what it takes to promote your content using email, social media, guest blogging and how to measure the results. Click here to find out more about “Blog Post Promotion: The Ultimate Guide”.

I own Kristi’s eBook, I consider it really valuable and that’s why I’m happy to promote it as an affiliate.

Over to you

I hope that this article makes your job easier and help you get started measuring your campaigns using Google Analytics. If you have questions or if you would like to share with us the way you’ve build your campaign, please use the comments section below.

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