How Google Analytics Improved
Our Business Over 75%

This is a guest post by Steve Chou.

Picture this. You’ve worked nights and weekends for several months straight to get your business off the ground. Your house is a mess. Your sink is full of dirty dishes and you’re still wearing the same clothes that you’ve had on for the last 4 days.

But…your business is finally up and running! The money is flowing in and you’re ecstatic that you’ve actually made your first dollars online. You pinch yourself and it’s not a dream. You’ve worked hard and you deserve a break. It wouldn’t hurt to relax a bit and take it easy would it? After all if people are buying, you can’t be doing that many things wrong, right?

A Personal Story

My wife and I fell into this trap early on with our online business. We spent so much time and effort launching our business that we were just happy to get something out there. And the problem was that since we were making sales, we didn’t feel as though anything was wrong.

In reality though, our business was running at only a fraction of its true potential. We were shedding potential customers left and right and didn’t realize it because we weren’t paying attention to our analytics.

Quick survey: How many of you actually delve deeply into your Google Analytics reports for your website on a regular basis? I don’t mean just checking your visits and your pageviews. How many of you take the time to look for hotspots in your sales funnel?

My wife and I certainly didn’t early on but it was a slap in the face when we finally did start paying attention. Below, I’ll describe 3 things that analytics told us was wrong with our business and how we addressed the problems. For added context, my wife and I run an online store selling wedding linens.

Problem Number 1: Customer Anxiety

The first thing that I noticed when I figured out how to set up a sales funnel report in Google Analytics was that we were shedding an unusually large number of customers during the checkout phase of our online store.

On the screen where customers entered in their personal information, a good percentage of people didn’t make it past the first page and I was stumped. After all, our shopping cart abandonment rate was way higher than what it should have been based on industry figures.

Desperate to understand the reason, I began to ask customers who phoned in their orders some detailed questions. The first question I asked was why they insisted on phoning in their order instead of placing it online.

And the number one answer I got was that they didn’t feel comfortable entering in their information online. This was the case even though they saw the yellow padlock in the corner of the browser. Strangely enough, many of our phone customers shopped online regularly so why were they hesistant to buy online with our store?

Based on this feedback, I made a few changes to our checkout page. Instead of a page with just form fields, I plastered security badges and trust logos near the submit button. In addition, I inserted some testimonials in the sidebar as well as a blurb describing our satisfaction guarantee. Sure enough, these changes resulted in a drastically lower abandonment rate.

Problem Number 2: Our Search Engine Sucked

Another thing I noticed after looking at our analytics report was that our search results page was the page with the highest exit rate. In other words, it meant that customers would do a search and leave right away. I couldn’t understand why until I actually tried to use our onsite search engine.

After typing in a few queries, I discovered that our search engine sucked. And it sucked badly. Even if the product name was slightly mispelled, no results were displayed. If so much as an extra ‘s’ was inserted at the end of a word to make it plural, no search results were displayed. Our search function was worthless.

Curious to see what other customers were searching for, I decided to log every customer search query over a period of a week to see how bad the situation was and the results were eye opening. I found that most people couldn’t spell very well and that the majority of customers who performed searches on our site got 0 results even though we carried the product in our store.

As a result, I did a complete revamp of our onsite search and added additional keywords and synonyms to our product pages. In addition, I added the ability to suggest possible search terms to customers who received 0 search results.

The upshot was that these changes drastically reduced our ‘search’ abandonment rate. Now customers could actually find the products that they wanted to buy. Imagine that!

Problem Number 3: Forcing Customers To Create An Account

When my wife and I first launched our store several years ago, we thought that it would be a good idea to log as much customer information as possible so we would have it in our database for future use.

As a result, we forced customers to create an account at our store before they could checkout. Looking back, this made absolutely no sense but at the time, my wife and I rationalized that we could provide more personalized service if we knew who was logged into our store.

I never would have noticed our mistake until Analytics told me that we lost almost 50% of our customers on the screen which made them either choose to create an account or login. When I changed this screen to allow a guest checkout, our conversion rate increased dramatically.

Key Takeaways

Launching your business is only the beginning. Even though the money might be rolling in and you’re making sales, there are probably gross inefficiencies with your web business that you just aren’t noticing. And the only way to tell what is going on is by taking an in depth look at your web analytics.

It doesn’t matter if you run an online store or if you run a blog, every page of your site should have a clear goal and a call to action. And if visitors are leaving prematurely, then there’s something wrong. Don’t run your website blind!

Image credit: Finsec

Steve Chou is the author of the My Wife Quit Her Job website, which is a great resource for anyone getting started in ecommerce. Make sure you subscribe to the blog and follow Steve on Twitter.