Find growth opportunities with GA

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@andreea-macoveiciuc-content-expert


Business Benefits

Find ways to improve user engagement and conversions on your website.


Create a list of questions about your website that will have answers you can do something about.

For example:

  • Is anyone actually using the text size or print buttons?
  • When they’re browsing, are they using search?
  • What do our most valuable users do differently on our site? Does that matter?
  • Are there broken devices or browsers?
  • Where are the leaks in the funnel? How can we fix them?
  • Which promotions are most effective?
  • When they do X, is an event being fired?
  • Are error messages being recorded?
  • How often are items removed from the cart?

Look at each question and ask what you’ll do about the answer. If nothing, remove the question from your list.

Do a site walk-through to identify bad parts of the website, and check Google Analytics to see if it correctly tracked all of your walk-through.

Use incognito mode for this, and analyze the actions tracked in your GA real-time report.

Perform a GA health check to discover if you are collecting all the necessary data, if the data is accurate, and if any tracking is broken or reporting incorrectly.

Answer questions like:

  • Is enhanced link attribution turned on?
  • Do you have your Virgin View and Working Views configured properly?
  • Have you configured your custom and default channel groupings?
  • Is internal site search set up and working correctly?
  • Does the site use a third-party cart? If so, do they have cross-domain tracking in place?

Think about your business objectives and how they relate to how you want people to use your website, then decide on metrics to focus on.

For example, if you want users to come to your landing page, find answers and then leave, then a high bounce rate is a good indicator that you’re achieving your goals. If you want users to proceed down the funnel and make a conversion, then a high bounce rate is a bad thing, you’re looking for a low bounce rate and high click-through or conversion rates.

Optimize pages that have a lot of traffic, but aren’t currently contributing to more conversions or subsequent page visits.

Use advanced filtering to view only pages that have been viewed a lot. Look for pages that are in your top 10 or 20 pages for the number of page-views, but a high bounce rate or a low value. Mark these as needing further investigation.

Use the navigation summary in Google Analytics to see where users go after they visit each page on your list. Scan each page in depth to see if there is anything technically wrong, for example, is the copy boring? Is the UX sloppy?

Create advanced reports that compare the number of sessions and an important metric, for example, bounce rate, per browser or device, and look for a deviance of more than 10% in that metric.

This could indicate an issue in the lower-performing devices or browsers. If you find any potential technical issues, investigate further using a tool like BrowserStack to emulate the problem device or browser.

Look at behavior reports, search for Page Not Found in page titles, and click on each page found to view broken links.

Fix broken links to point to an existing page or create redirects for external links.

Navigate to Behavior > Site Speed > Overview and compare the average site load time to the load times for your most important pages.

Make a list of any pages that exceed the average by more than 10%, and flag them for further analysis and performance improvements. Segment pages by device used, to spot which page has performance issues on specific devices.

Open the funnel visualization by navigating to Conversions > Goals and look for stages with a high exit percentage.

Make a list of these pages and flag them for UX and micro-conversion analysis. Depending on which stage of the funnel you are on, small improvements can make a high impact on your return. For example, if you’re an average ecommerce site, and you improve the checkout page even slightly, you’ll see a big increase in revenue. If you optimize closer to the top of the funnel, a small improvement won’t have as big of an impact.

Create segments in Google Analytics to gather targeted insights from specific demographics like countries or age groups.

For example, you could check if people who are over 70 years are struggling to use your site, or if customers in a particular country are experiencing slow load times.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T16:01:26Z