How Google Analytics Can Help You With Your eCommerce Site

By Adam  |  1 Jul 2015 19:00:00

If you want to have a successful eCommerce website it is vital that you understand your audience: what do they like? How likely is somebody to make a purchase after they visit your site? Do they look around at lots of the pages, or only ever look at the homepage? If you had the answer to these questions you would be able to tailor your website to suit the needs of your customers even more. One tool you can use to give you these answer is Google Analytics; a completely free service offered by Google.

Google Analytics will provide you with a number of graphs which show you how many people are coming to your site, which pages are most popular, which pages are least popular and so on. This is a great way to help you to identify your strengths and your weaknesses. If a page that shows off one of the best features of your product/service is barely seen by any visitors to the site then you can take steps to ensure that more people see that page; maybe draw attention to it more on the homepage, share links to it on social media or whatever you think best.

What is especially useful to owners of eCommerce websites is the fact that Google Analytics can show you your page's 'bounce rate'. The 'bounce rate' of a website is how often people visit it only to leave without clicking on anything. Of course, there will be times when someone comes to your site but something comes up and they leave right away, or times when they accidentally click on your website and then leave because they never intended to go there in the first place, so every website will have at least a small 'bounce rate' but a large one is something to be concerned about. Generally, if somebody has gone to the homepage of your eCommerce site, they are there because they are hoping to purchase something; if they leave that means they've changed their mind about the purchase, either because your site looks unprofessional, untrustworthy or maybe even generally uninteresting. Either way, something is wrong with your homepage and you need to work on it; doing so is likely to increase your sales.

So, why hesitate? It would be a good idea to sign up for Google Analytics now. An astute business person could come to some excellent conclusions from the data and use the information to make the website even more effective.