At this point, everything is in place for gathering all the data from your website and shopping cart, but just owning the data is not going to boost up your sales.
You must get actionable insights from your data, like:
I need to treat differently trial users from new users.
Google organic searches are bringing me lots of traffic but few conversions. Maybe it’s time to focus on other
keywords.
Lots of users exit through the “Terms and Conditions”
page. Maybe there is something wrong with it.
All the users having Java Script disabled bounce, as they cannot access the website.
Please note that the insights are unique for every website and software business, so the above are just pure examples.
On the following chapters we will focus on answering as many possible questions like the ones above. The answers should provide solutions for improving your website and boosting your sales.
What is you conversion rate for purchases?
When you started your online business, you probably had many goals in mind, but there is one we are sure we can guess:
Increase your sales.
It’s time to see real time how this happens, so you don’t have to wait till the end of the year or the semester to see how you are doing.
A valuable report you’ll get is to see why your sales increased and decreased over time. Maybe we are running a bit too far, as
Google Analytics will never be able to answer the “Why” question, but it will give the hint towards the “guilty” factors. From there, answering the Why question is just a matter of testing or
observation.
So, let’s set up the first Conversion Goal tracking in Google Analytics. Go to your website profile settings and, under the Conversion Goals and Funnels section, click the Add goal link:
Setting up Purchase Conversion Goals
For purchases, a conversion will occur every time a user ends up on the Finish Purchase page on your shopping cart. Here is how you set up a Conversion Goal:
Figure 11 – Setting up a Goal for tracking completed purchases The Goal URL should be: \/order\/finish.php(.*)
Important Note: If you are a vendor selling software through Avangate, just fill in the fields exactly as shown in the image above.
Here is where we go a step further. Wouldn’t it be nice to find out how many users enter your shopping cart, through which page they enter and where do some of them abandon the shopping process?
To do this, you need to set up the funneling. Follow the instructions, just as shown in fig. 12:
Figure 12 – Setting up funneling steps for monitoring abandonment rate through the Avangate shopping cart
The steps in the above image are:
\/order\/checkout.php(.*)
\/order\/payment.php(.*)
Note: leaving the “Required Step” checkbox unchecked will insure that you will get data on all the users entering the shopping cart, no matter what the entry point is. Otherwise, the funnel will only show the visitors coming through the Step 1.
Having this done, a brand new report is going to be generated under your website’s Analytics data. Click on the Conversion Goals menu item under your website reports and you will get a report that looks like this:
Special attention should be paid to the Funnel Visualization chart for the purchase goal, where cart abandonment will be easy to understand.
Figure 13 – Goals overview in Google Analytics
Figure 14 – Funneling overview for completed transactions in Google Analytics
Setting up Download Conversion Goals
As the number of downloads is going to be an important
performance indicator, here is how you setup a conversion goal for downloads:
For better understanding on how to create Goals for your website for different actions, we recommend accessing the Google
Analytics Documentation center and the Google Support Group.
Figure 15 – Setting up goal conversion tracking for software downloads.
Even More Value
There is even more to understanding the value of your traffic. A special metric, called $index, has been implemented by Google.
You will notice it as it’s included in your content overview reports, just as shown in the image.
Here is a very good explanation of this metric:
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-in&answer=86205
To summarize, $index tells us the value of a page that a user visits before landing on a goal page. That value is determined like this: (Goal value (if assigned) + eCommerce value) / Total number of visits on that page.
At this point, Google Analytics can track your eCommerce transactions, which means that $index will automatically be
Figure 16 – The $index metric under the Top Content report in Google Analytics
calculated for all the pages on the websites that users visit before buying.
But another goal of your website is to increase the number of downloads. It would be great to find out which pages within your website are most valuable for creating downloads.
You can deal with it in 2 ways. The easy but not so accurate way:
give the value of 1 dollar (or whatever value you consider right) for every finished download.
The little bit more difficult but much more accurate way: calculate how much a download values for you and setup that value for the goal. How do you do that? The following chapter is going to focus on this.
What did we get so far?
eCommerce tracking in place. Your sales data will be available in Google Analytics and not only that: you’ll be able to know which of your online campaigns (banner or link exchange, PPC or organic keyword, blogger or
download website) is bringing you most profit.
Conversion Goals tracking for purchases and downloads.
You know what pages within your website are most responsible for triggering purchases.
Shopping cart abandonment rate monitoring. You can make customizations on the pages where the users
abandon the shopping cart in order to decrease this rate.
Sometimes, even a small change of colors and layout can improve the user experience so she doesn’t get lost in the process.