How to Use Google Analytics to Optimize Ecommerce

Analyzing the detailed data found within Google Analytics (GA) can show marketers what products drive the most sales, which audiences respond most favorably to your brand, and where customers tend to fall off the path-to-purchase. Whether you’re launching a seasonal campaign, a brand refresh, or a new product, Google Analytics will highlight opportunities to perfect your marketing strategy.

Here are three of the biggest benefits ecommerce brands can expect to find in GA, and how they can help you optimize your latest campaigns:

Attribution through GA’s Assisted Conversions

Assisted conversions draw information from each of your active marketing channels and attempt to attribute credit to each, highlighting where your marketing dollars are at their most effective. Channels are divided into three categories — first interaction, assist interaction, and last interaction. First and last interactions are exactly what they sound like, while assist interactions are any engagements along the path to purchase besides the initial customer action and the final conversion.

This can be paired with any number of other tools for further insights. An analysis of top-performing keywords might reveal a high percentage of users who search a specific term only to quickly bounce after landing on your home page. If this top traffic-earning keyword leads to a comparatively poor number of last interactions or conversions, marketers should investigate and consider whether the traffic is worth the inefficient ad dollars — it could be that your product is being confused for another site or service, your site isn’t offering the right type of information, or the keyword is simply attracting the wrong audience.

Understanding the potential pitfalls within your active marketing efforts, which channels are seeing growth and which creative and messaging combination elicits the best response saves advertisers time and money that might otherwise be spent on unnecessary experimentation. Gone are the days of simply focusing on last-click metrics — an omnichannel approach is the ecommerce marketing gold standard, and assisted conversions area key addition to any advertisers’ tool belt.

Locate Blind Spots Along the Path-to-Purchase

Did you know Google Analytics automatically generates a landing page report for your website? Knowing where your customers first interact with your brand (and more importantly, when they typically leave your site) shows you where your gaps are in your existing path-to-purchase. Inferring why a potential shopper left before making a purchase is still up to the advertiser, but pages with consistently high bounce rates will help you zero in on potential issues with ease.

Combined with GA’s conversion paths tool, advertisers can see their own brand through a customer’s eyes and better understand where the experience may be lacking. You work hard to attract new users — avoid losing that effort to poor page load times or muddled site navigation. The distance between a customer initially clicking on a product and the checkout page should be as short as possible. Quickly shoring up site glitches and frustrating checkout issues preserves customer loyalty and shows the online community that your brand is in touch with customer needs.

Finding and eliminating your would-be shoppers’ stumbling blocks through GA enhances the user experience on your site and encourages happy customers to return.

Reaching Your Target Audience (and Discovering New Ones)

Your pool of potential online customers is as vast as it is diverse. Though campaigns are generally designed with a specific audience in mind, they won’t always be the only ones interested in what you’re selling — and it pays to know more about these unexpected users that are showing interest.

Demographics data is one of the most powerful tools marketers can use to increase campaign performance and grow their brand’s market share. Audience insights can sift through valuable data by age range, interest, geographical location, engagement type, and device — it can even determine whether a user is a new or returning customer. Segmenting audience data will showcase which channels contribute high-quality leads, where next to apply retargeting campaigns to recapture the most engaged customers, and which unanticipated audience segments are primed for further testing.

Using marketing data wisely is the key to any degree of success in online marketing. Google Analytics’ simple tools to determine a campaign’s efficiency, the average user’s web experience, and which audiences pose the biggest upside for your business are invaluable to your business’ digital strategy. Any ecommerce brand aiming to make the most of what GA has to offer can expect a more efficient use of ad dollars — and more exciting opportunities for growth.