Jingle bells, analytics sells! Christmas is only a few weeks away and of course, you want your online store to attract and maintain customers during this period. Shopify and Google each offer analytics that will help you to understand how shoppers use your store and where it needs to be improved.
Both Shopify and Google will allow you to look back at data that was tracked during last year’s festive period, provided your analytics services were set up at the time. This makes it easier to compare apples with apples. If you don’t have your analytics set up, do it now so that you can use this data to improve your store in the future (and during the next Christmas period).
Google Analytics tracks valuable user data which helps to understand how your customers shop in your store. You can use the insights you gain from it to optimize your cart, product, and checkout pages. You can also more easily track where your customers drop off and troubleshoot the issues.
These are some of the useful things you’ll be able to track using Google Analytics:
If your site is converting, it is doing what you want it to do – getting people to make purchases or generating enquiries. If your store doesn’t have a good conversion rate you might need to improve your check-out process, add product descriptions, use better quality images, or find ways to improve visitors’ trust in your site.
Use Google Analytics to see what type of device most of your customers use when buying from your store. If you see that you have a lot of traffic on your mobile store, but a low conversion rate, it might mean that your store needs to be better optimized for mobile. If you’re experiencing the opposite – high traffic on desktop, but a low conversion rate, then you will probably need to improve your store’s user experience (UX).
You’ll be able to see the most common age groups and gender of people who visit your store. See which demographic shopped on your store during the last festive season and tailor your marketing campaigns accordingly.
Traffic refers to the number of people who visit your website within a certain time frame. By analyzing when your store experienced dips or peaks in traffic, you’ll be able to figure out whether the last Christmases marketing campaign did or didn’t work, why this was the case, and how to improve on it this year.
This refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing just one page, which means you’re losing a lot of potential sales. A high bounce rate could be due to poor UX design, unclear or complicated shopping journey, slow site speed, or even an unprofessional looking site due to low-quality images.
Shopify has a beginner’s guide to Google Analytics if you need help setting it up or if you want to make sure you’re using it correctly.
Other useful metrics available on Google Analytics include average time spent on a page, the total number of transactions made on your site, and your total revenue.
Shopify’s dashboard will give you a good idea of how your site is performing, at a glance. On the overview dashboard, you will be able to:
Merchants can also generate reports through Shopify’s analytics function. The more advanced your Shopify plan is, the more reports you’ll be able to access. Some of the useful reports you can use are:
See how your conversion rate has changed over a certain time period to see whether UX changes or marketing campaigns are working or not.
People are less likely to purchase from your site if it has a slow load speed.
Determine what visitors to your store were searching for during a specific period to see which products were the most popular. You can also use this to troubleshoot product descriptions for products that don’t appear in searches to make it easier for shoppers to find what they’re looking for.
Shopify’s analytics are reasonably straightforward to use, but they don’t give as in-depth an insight as Google Analytics does. That’s why we recommend using both services.
To have a truly merry Christmas, decide which improvements line up best with your business goals, budget, and available time. For those that don’t yet use analytics, the sooner you set up these services, the sooner you can start improving your site based on data-driven, informed decisions.
Get in touch with ShopCreatify to audit and improve your Shopify or Shopify Plus store.
Masthead banner image by Marc Newberry
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