Archive for the ‘E-Commerce’ category

Five tips to consider when reviewing your Google Analytics KPI’s

January 30th 2008 by Andrew Banks in E-Commerce, Google AnalyticsNo Comments »

I’m often asked by clients which Google Analytics metrics are the most important to measure, how they should be measured and what they should do with them.

As each clients business is different, the top five key metrics will vary, but these below are the five I think every business should be watching, why they should be watching them and what they should be looking for.

1. Number of visits

Although quite an obvious one to keep an eye on, the point I want to raise here is how to monitor this statistic. A lot of young web business become too concerned with this value and scrutinize it on an over regular basis. Although it’s nice in the early days to see the traffic you’re getting (we’ve all been at the stage where we check our stats daily) the best way to get value from this value is to set a target for where you want this value to be over a one, three and six month period.

Once this is in place, it’s down to you to employ a strategy to get the traffic to those levels. I’m not suggesting only checking these value at month one, three and six but instead maybe check these weekly and then fortnightly to ensure your marketing is on track to hit your one, three and six month goals. Do not concentrate on the actual visitor numbers but instead on the trend for these visitor numbers in relation to your targets.

2. Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the proportion of visitors who visit your website and leave before visiting another page. More often than not this suggests the user wasn’t happy with what they saw and decided not to continue into the site.

This can be down to one of a few things, including:

• Inappropriate content on the landing page
• Unlikeable design
• Technical issues (how many people include the Google Analytics code in there error page, which will be contributing to the bounce rate?)

The general guide with the bounce rate statistic is the lower the better and again the guide is to monitor the trend over a period of time, as opposed to becoming overly concerned with the actual figure on a day by day basis.

It’s always worth baring in mind that, on the other hand, in a few cases a high bounce rate is not always symptomatic of a poor website. In the case of blogs where each page is generally a very specific article that may have been linked to from an RSS feed, it is likely that a user will simply visit to read a specific article and not visit any other pages.

3. Conversion rate

Any website is built with a purpose, be it to get someone to contact a company, fill in a registration form or purchase a product. In the case of a blog this could be to subscribe to the RSS feed. They key is that every website has a goal which can be monitored.

The rate at which visitors take one of your predefined goals or ‘positive actions’ is called the conversion rate.

People often ask me which I see as the most important KPI when reviewing a website and for me the conversion rate is the single most relevant figure on any website. A high conversion rate simply states that a large amount of customers are doing what you wanted them to do on your website.

What impacts upon the conversion rate is huge. Generally it’s the right mix of good quality traffic (Note: not necessarily high volumes), a managed customer experience and the right product or service offering as a business.

Seeing the conversion rate as a very high level KPI is key to getting the most value out of it. Google Analytics provides a wealth of more detailed stats on the various factors that affect the conversion rates, which I will pick up on in greater detail in a future article.

Many customers experience low conversion rates and don’t know where to look for solutions, often blaming low traffic volumes or blaming it on the time of year. I’ve not found one website yet where I couldn’t increase its conversion rate, and ultimately revenue and profit, by making improvements to the customer experience. That’s a topic for a whole series of articles to come, as is how to work out whether it’s actually the product that’s at fault.

4. Traffic sources

Search engines have a lot to answer for. Over the last few years there’s been a major push by search engine marketing companies and lots of website owners are becoming savvier about SEO and are naturally moving up the search rankings. This is definitely a good thing but a lot of the business owners I have worked with lose good business sense and seem to be overwhelmed by the traffic that search engines drive to them. It’s not uncommon for a website to receive 90% of its traffic (and ultimately revenue) from visitors who started at Google.

So how many of these businesses could survive if they lost 90% of their revenue? Probably none.

The risk of having 90% of your business coming through one source is too risky and online businesses should look to diversify their online marketing in order to reduce their dependency on such dominant sources such as Google. All it takes is for Google to change their algorithm, or for a company to be removed from Google, and the impact will be felt all the way down to the business’ bottom line.

Then looking at traffic source statistics my advice is to look to increase traffic from all sources over time, but (and this is the key point) to invest more resource into the smaller traffic sources in an attempt for them to be responsible for more of your traffic over time.
Your Google Analytics pie chart for traffic sources should not show any one source of traffic dominating for a long period of time.

5. E-Commerce

If you’re running an e-commerce website and are serious about analytics then you should be using e-commerce transaction tracking in Google Analytics.

Tracking e-commerce transactions allows the actual values of your sales to be monitored which in itself is a great bonus as it allows you to monitor revenue over time. Google Analytics doesn’t just stop here though; this data now becomes available in almost all other Google Analytics reports meaning you can track, amongst other things:

• Revenue and conversion rate per traffic source
• Revenue and conversions rate per keyword
• Revenue per country
• Product performance
• Average order value
• The number of times a user visits before purchasing
• The number of days it takes a user to purchase

Understanding which of your keywords or traffic sources have the highest conversion rate, highest average order value and highest per visit value is an extremely powerful tool in deciding where your marketing spend and effort is best placed.

If you’re not using Google Analytics E-Commerce tracking then you definitely should be.

Allow the customer to find the product - GameStation.co.uk

January 24th 2008 by Andrew Banks in E-Commerce, Websites1 Comment »

Surely one of the most fundamental tasks a customer undertakes when trying to purchase, be it online or offline, is finding the product in the first place. In an online purchasing experience this boils down to one of two things - simple navigation, or more often than not, the search box.

Whilst looking online for a new XBOX game today I landed upon GameStation where I conducted a quick search for Assasin’s Creed (one of the best selling XBOX 360 games at the moment). Suprisingly, GameStation didn’t even sell the game (or so the search results told me). Having been into one of there many retail outlets I know they stock the game - so why wasn’t it on the website?

The problem is with GameStation’s broken search feature not accepting the ‘ character. I’m guessing for security reasons (SQL Injection) they’re stripping certain characters before sending the search into the database. There’s much better ways of protecting from SQL Injection that don’t impact on a customer purchasing experience as much as this approach does, if at all. To see this for yourself simply go to www.gamestation.co.uk and search for “assassin’s creed”. You’ll notice that no search results are returned and your search phrase has been cut down to “assassin” in the search box.

Regardless of the cause of this, the crux is that this will have lost GameStation a certain number of sale, especially over the Christmas period. The search works on Play, Amazon and Game - three of GameStation’s biggest competitors.

I’d be interested to know if the guys at GameStation actually know about this. My suspicion  is that they don’t, but they will be wondering why Amazon, Play and Game outsold them at Christmas.