No matter you are the manager or owner of the business, sure you cannot manage an online shop by walking around and observe your visitors to know where they are running into trouble. You must ought to fix this and enhance the shopping experience for your customers. Therefore, you need an analytics tool like Google Analytics, Omniture or Coremetrics etc. to plan you marketing strategy by data driven decision making. Of course, visiting Hong Kong Web Analytics Blog can also help because the following will walk through what you can learn from your customers by using free tool – Google Analytics.
Goal Funnel
There is a Goal Funnel report in GA that provides you the information on how well your site serve the ends you have in mind. Up to 20 goals there, which are pages/visit, time on site URL Destination or events that represent a specific objective or desired outcome from a customer’s visit to your site. Very often, for some non-ecommerce website, goal can be set as action like sign up to a newsletter, download a document, member registration etc. So with the goal funnel, you can track a goal along with a series of pages, here talking about a ecommerce site which may look like this:
- Page one of the checkout process
- Shipping-address page
- Credit-card information page
- Order confirmation page
- Thank You Page
Once you have these goal funnels set up correctly, the Funnel Visualization report under conversion tab gives you the idea of how and why many visitors leave your checkout process along the checkout steps. The page of the step must have something frustrating or confusing visitors while there is a huge dropout rate on that particular step.
Event Tracking
Beyond Goal Funnel, a very useful function is event tracking. During the whole checkout process, there are many ways which a visitor can go wrong to experience an error message from your site, e.g. incorrectly fill out a form field, forgetting to provide information on particular field or taking too long are some of the reason why your checkout can raise an error to visitors. As a manager, you may figure out there are some descriptions of form fields are misleading or some form fields are easily being overlooked. So anything you can action to reduce the chances of a customer running into these errors?
To enable GA Event Tracking, put it in the JavaScript error handling code on your site. Under Content tab, the Top Events report is there to show you which errors are experienced frequently by visitors.
All you need to do is to make tasks easier for your customer and strive user-friendly design. With the help of those two reports can effectively help reducing customer frustration and improve customer retention. Otherwise, going to your competitor is just a click away.