Got a website or landing page? Discover how and where to start when it comes to improving your conversions. Watch this simple tutorial and:

• Find out where your conversions are coming from – and whether your regional campaigns are working
• Uncover any bugs preventing conversions – mobile v desktop v Android v iPhone –
• Understand how many times people visit before they convert – so you can develop strategies to get them coming back again and again

Where to start optimising: Transcript

This is for you if you have a website or landing page that’s been up and running a while, and is set up to get conversions.

And maybe you’re at the stage now, thinking, “OK, we’ve got an idea of how many conversions we’re getting. Now we want to look at how we can optimise it. Where do we look to make improvements first,” things like that.

So what I’m using here is, as you can see, Google Analytics. Hopefully you’ve got that set up – and it’s a test view that comes from Google. It’s got enough data for us, and I can show you how you can jump in and find areas where you can start your optimisation attempts.

What I’m going to do first – we want to get an understanding of the different customers that you’ve got, so for this particular test view it’s an international e-commerce website.

One of the first things to look at, if that was the case, is to see where people are coming from, in terms of different regions. If we can see any clues or trends or anything like that about conversion rates in particular countries. You go to Acquisition > All Traffic and then Source/Medium and then that will give us a list of all the different ways people are arriving on the page or website.

There’s a lot of data here, this is based on three months’ worth of data. If you ever want to change that (I’ll just move my head out of the way) and there’s the option there to change the dates.

(I’ll just move myself back up there) Now, let’s for this particular video, let’s imagine that you’ve been running the SEO campaign. You want to see what the impact is on your conversion rates for people that arrive via Google and organically; they’ve typed something into Google.

If we click on Google/organic – the key always with optimisation of conversions is to drill down. The best way to do that in Google Analytics is – get to know this handy function here: Secondary Dimension. That’s how you’re going to drill down, because at the moment we’ve got for this particular website people that arrive via Google and organic, is almost 72 000 users.

The conversion rate is 0.22% which on its own doesn’t really tell us much. What we’re going to look for here is secondary dimension, and we’re going to look for how the conversion rates depend or vary country by country. If we open this up now we can see here the United States is by far the biggest market, just over 23,000 users in the last three months, conversion rate is 0.62%.

And then we look at the second biggest country which is India – almost 8,000 users and a conversion rate of a big fat 0.

Let’s have a look at the next biggest audience; it’s from the United Kingdom – almost 5,000, and how many conversions – again 0.

As we can see one more, we’ll have a look at Canada. Just under 3,000 users and yeah conversion rate there 0.25%. 10 transactions 10 conversions. What we can see here is that this website seems to be geared up for North America at the moment, so if you’re targeting people in India. United Kingdom or elsewhere, you can see at the moment your strategy isn’t working.

At this stage it would be a case of looking at your page or your website and seeing why is it that people from North America, US, Canada, are converting whereas people in other countries aren’t. Is the tone of voice very US English? Is the style and images aimed at purely people from the United States and Canada?

If you’re looking to target people in the UK you might want to look at maybe making things more relevant. Whether you put up in big letters “we ship to the UK”. it might be as blatant as that. That can work – so you’re looking at clues really. That’s just one element I’d look to start from if it was an international campaign.

Let’s go on to another area. If we go back again, secondary dimension, another area I want to look at is how conversion rates differ depending on what browser people use. Mainly to find out if there are any bugs because sometimes conversion rates can be affected by something as simple as a simple browser being updated to Chrome version 2 million and 1, or something like that.

There might be a bit of code in your website that doesn’t respond well to that, so what we’re going to have a look for here is browser. On the right here you can see if you hover over question marks it’s got a little definition of what they all are. So if we click on browser – again we’re just looking for clues at this stage –  so if we have a look here, people on Chrome is by far the biggest audience – 53,408. Of those people, 36 transactions, which means a conversion rate of 0.05% conversion rate.

If you have a look at the next one down which is Safari, which is far fewer – just under 15,000 – but of those 15,000 the conversion rate is a lot higher than on Chrome – at 0.95%. Straightaway that’s a clue that we need to look at why the conversion rates on Chrome are so much lower than they are on Safari.

It will be a case of getting developers to run some debugging, some testing, just to see if there are any issues with how the website or page works on Chrome, and then the next area I’ll probably look would be to start getting understanding of the actual audience when it comes to e-commerce. So what I’d be looking at here is how many times they need to visit before they convert on average. A way to do that would be if you search again in secondary dimension – that’s where all the action is. Go there and look for a count of sessions, and then that’s going to tell us how many times people are visiting before they convert. So what I want to group this into is – if we click here (ecommerce conversion rate) then that’s going to sort out the order in terms of conversion rate.

So highest at the top, so the highest rate is 0.47% and that’s from people who have had a session 4 times. 4 times they’ve had a session. The thing about sessions versus page views, or unique page views, hits is for another video. But for now sessions is the metric that you need to be concerned with for conversions.

Let’s have a look then at the next most popular which is 0.36% and that’s 6 sessions were needed and then in third place is 8. So what we can get from this is that people need to visit a few times before they convert. Which is quite common with e-commerce sites anyway – they might be comparing you against other sites.

Something that you should look at is “What are we doing to get people to come back. Do we have a newsletter? Are we running social campaigns? Are we gathering people’s email addresses when they land on our website at first?” All those sorts of things, if you can get those in place then as we can see here from the data, your conversions will go up

So that’s 3 areas that will help you with converting and improving and optimising. As I say you’re looking at where people are coming from, where there are any patterns, you’re looking at any trends or anything any possible concerns with the device or browser they’re using. If conversion rates are higher on a particular browser – we chose browser here but you can look at particular networks, devices, iPhone versus Android, anything like that you can drill down. It’s all under the secondary dimension.

And then the third element would be about the type of customer – their behaviour. So as you can see here, the more times you can get someone to visit this website, the more conversions you’re going to get. That’s 3 areas where I recommend starting with optimising your conversions, which you can do, or you can get in touch with me and I can help you do it as well.

You can do that by visiting conversiontown.com and then telling me what you need. I hope that video has been useful, thanks for watching – all the best of your conversions.