E-commerce has become an essential component to retail, but it also can introduce a number of missteps to allow a customer to make a sale. These 5 tips highlight the flaws that can appear (and some tips in avoiding them with e-commerce analytics).
1. Making online activities difficult for the customer to complete.
E-commerce sites can get a bit complicated when tasked to carry a multitude of products. Any commerce site will require some adjustment to ensure that customers can complete purchase easily.
Thus a key analysis is to examine the visitor flow reports to determine which pages keep the purchasing behavior simple. Highlight where visitors are exiting a page, and examine the content on that page for improvement ideas.
Page speed can also be examined, to determine if images or scripts are creating page load issues. Slowly loading pages can persuade visitors to leave a site. Page load service Yottaa discovered in its analysis that a 1 second delay in page load speed can lead to a 7% decline in conversion, which means lower sales. Check out this Zimana post for more on page load tools and this post on tips to improve page speed for e-commerce.
2. Not targeting the right customers
To attract the right customer to the site, use the Demographic reports in Google Analytics to monitor how site traffic best matches the intended audience. The age group reported should reflect the expected customer base. For example, a music site offering downloads should reflect younger customers if the bulk of its music sales are the hottest acts that appeals to teens and younger adults.
3. Advertising that eats into low margin products
Selling low margin products online does not eliminate the risk of selling at a loss. If those items require paid search to be highlighted, then the advertising costs can exceed the margins from each sale. For example, if an AdWords campaign costing $2-$3 a click exceeds a $1 margin of an advertised product, then a retailer is spending more than what it makes on that product.
Periodically analyze the average order value of each purchase, and examine sales by SKU. Is there a better way to offer the product - by advertising a low margin product as part of a package rather than as a solo purchase.
Moreover, analyze conversions from AdWords campaigns - are the click throughs leading to sales? Use Smart Goals to help plan the identify visits that are “most likely” to convert.
Follow up with bidding alerts in the AdWords manager to stop campaigns when bid cost exceed a planned amount.
4. Not carrying what customers are looking for.
Using the site search reports can highlight the terms in which customers are constantly looking for. The terms will likely be brands or products not offered. Frequent appearance of such terms indicate potential interest; Time after search metrics can indicate if people are remaining on-site after a search, or leaving immediately after a query, implying a dissatisfaction and that the item should have been offered on the site.
This CMS wire post can explain more about how site search reports can be best analyzed.
5. Annoying your customers with hidden costs.
No customer like surprise details about a transaction when they shop online, so a good e-commerce site should highlight complete purchase information at the check out stage. A product page should set expectations of what the customer will expect when purchasing.
Monitoring the check out metrics in the commerce report can provide an indication if customers are consistently leaving the check out process. There are two steps that can address traffic decline.
One way is to set up a survey to trigger at the shopping cart when the customer drops out of the cycle.
Another way is setting up an A/B test to compare content can highlight what images or descriptions better resonate with customers.
