Only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. Needless to say, identifying your website's primary conversion drivers is crucial. Without identifying and later, testing, you can't expect to improve conversions on a larger scale. But with the right tracking in place, you can analyze not just customer engagement, but also which traffic sources are contributing the most to your bottom line.
Luckily, with Google Analytics, you can glean a lot of helpful insights—but going one step beyond, how do you use those insights to make actionable changes to convert more shoppers on your site?
Define your conversions
CXL institute states that 55% of companies plan to spend more on conversion rate optimization. So you don't want your business to be left behind.
However, before identifying conversion points on your website, you should have a clear understanding of what visitor actions count as conversions, and set those as conversions in your analytics platform. For many eCommerce marketers, a conversion would be when a visitor makes a payment to place an order for your product.
With regard to Google Analytics, these actions are referred to as "goals." If you haven't already, here's how you can choose and create the right goals. Once the goals are in place, give your analytics solution a few days to accumulate conversion data. Next, you'll be ready to dig through and identify conversion points.
Identifying conversion points
There are many reports within Google Analytics where you can identify your conversion drivers. Let's take a look at the major places to look into.
Pages and posts driving conversions
Let's say you're publishing new content on a regular basis, and you want to analyze how successful those pages are at triggering conversions.
From the navigation menu on the left, go to Behavior → Site Content → Landing Pages.
On the right side of the table, you'll see some extra columns associated with your conversion goals. More specifically, you'll be able to see the number of conversions and conversion rates.
Armed with information on which pages are converting the best, you can restructure your website and create more similar pages and content. After all, the human brain forms its first impression in 50 milliseconds, so dedicating resources to an aesthetically pleasing, visual landing page ensures you make that first impression a positive one.
In addition, you can take note to avoid creating additional types of pages that do not perform well.
Traffic sources driving conversions
This is one of the reports where conversion tracking really shines. It allows you to reveal some great insights. To get to this report, go to Acquisition → All Traffic → Channels.
Here you can see each traffic source and associated conversion rate. That's not all. You can click on a traffic source to dig deeper. For example, if you click "Referral," you'll see the exact websites sending traffic to yours, and sort this data by conversion rate. Click on a domain to see the individual pages sending you high-converting traffic. Why is this important? Because then you can take steps to promote these pages even more to give them a traffic boost. These pages, in return, will send you more visitors who are likely to convert.
On the same note, you will obviously find domains that promote a lot of traffic that doesn't ultimately convert. You can analyze these cases and try to understand why.
From there, you can fix the problem or spend less effort on getting backlinks from similar websites in the future.
Visualize conversion paths
81% of sales happen until after 7 or more contact occurrences. So, you can imagine how important it is to understand each step a visitor takes on the way to conversion.
That's why visualizing your conversion paths can help. Google Analytics has a separate section devoted to conversions at Conversions → Goals.
One of the most useful reports here is Reverse Goal Path. It lets you quickly see the pages and posts sending the most conversions. Another is the Funnel Visualization.
The funnel visualization helps you understand the funnel steps where visitors are dropping off the most.
You can use this information to plug in the leaks and optimize your funnel accordingly.
Devices driving conversions
If you know the devices from where most conversions come from, you'll know on which devices to test your website or app first. This will save precious time and also improve conversions.
So head over to Audience → Mobile → Devices. Then prioritize developing the design specifications for the exact models that are converting the most.
From this report, you can also see which devices contribute the most to your traffic yet have a low conversion rate. These should also get your attention so you can identify the cause and come up with a resolution.
Optimization: User-generated content (UGC) driving conversions
Since 41% of consumers only need to see between one and four UGC reviews in order to be influenced to purchase, it's a must-have to boost conversion rates while promoting an authentic community on your company's site.
Pixlee (now Emplifi) automatically pulls in UGC from fans on your social media platforms of choice, allowing you to curate the pieces of content to best fit your website. Once you set UGC live on product pages or within shoppable inspiration galleries, you can then track your new content's performance from within Pixlee's platform.
This means everything from customer repeat visit rate and engagement rate to average order value and direct conversions. Radio Flyer saw a 7x increase in conversion rate after implementing interactive UGC galleries onsite.
Acquiring more and more new customers is expensive and time-consuming, but if your conversion rates are suffering, it might feel like the only option to grow your brand. Ultimately, a simple percentage boost in conversion can translate to a large lift in revenue. By identifying the main conversion points on your site, and optimizing with UGC, you'll be able to drive more conversions from your existing customers, boosting ROI.
Lucy Carney writes for Website Builder Expert, the leading authority in helping people build an online presence. She enjoys using her digital expertise to help growing businesses find success, and you can find her writing on blogs such as UsabilityGeek, Shopify, and Serpstat.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on pixlee.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
