5 ways to Use Google Analytics to Improve the Customer Experience
Google Analytics is about 15 years old and can be found installed on almost every website. It has evolved a lot from a simple “How many hits did my website get today?” tool to a very comprehensive analytic suite that can help you formulate your marketing strategy.
Despite this evolution, I see people still using Google Analytics to report basic numbers like pageviews, bounce rate, etc. The issue is that reporting these numbers will not lead to actionable insights (in fact there is no insights at all when I report that we had “16,487 pageviews last month”).
In this article I would like to provide you with a few points on how you and your team can use Google Analytics to gain real insights that will improve the customer experience (and sales).
But what do I mean with customer experience?
Let me explain: Users will come to your website with an goal in mind(find a certain product, book an appointment, subscribe, etc.). If your website allows the users to meet this goal easily, then the customer experience will be good. If they encounter a lot of obstacles, the experience will be bad. So let’s see how we can measure that.
#1 Search Queries
If your site has a search bar, Google Analytics can capture search terms used by visitors. This is powerful data that allows you to see what visitors are looking for (what are their goals?). For example, if you are selling mobile phones and visitors are searching for “Galaxy S20” but you don’t carry this model, the customer experience will be disappointing. But without looking at this data, you would be unaware that visitors don’t find what they are looking for.
You can use this feature to gain more insights for the following questions:
- Which searches lead to the most conversions?
- What are the product/content opportunities (stock the latest Galaxy…)?
- Which segment are interested in what products?(example: most Galaxy S20 searches were made by Males 25–35 years old)
How to do this:
A very simple setup: Just go to the admin area of your Google Analytics, to the “View” section where you can enable “Site Search Tracking”.
#2 Segment your data
Another common mistake that I see is that people look at Google Analytics data without segmenting it. This comes back to a very fundamental question that you need to answer before you can look at any data: “Who are my customers?”
To illustrate why this is can an issue: The “Avg. Session Duration” may be really poor, but it is actually above average for your target audience (18–25 year old females, for example), which is all that matters to you.
So improving the customer experience means you need to know first know who your customers are (which Google Analytics can tell you too) and then segment your data to see if you are delivering a good experience to this audience(s).
How do do this:
There are two ways: (1) Select your segment on top of the Google Analytics screen or create a custom one (how to build a segment in Google Analytics). (2) Use secondary dimensions to break down the data into age, gender, device type, etc. to gain a more precious understanding of the situation.
#3 Goals /Conversion Rate
Another “must” that I see a lot of people skip is to set up goal conversion rates.
This goes back to what we said at the beginning (visitors coming to your site have a goals). Now you need to measure how many of your visitors have successfully met their goal. This gives you a conversion rate. If your conversion rate is below average (find your industry benchmark here), your visitors are not happy with the experience.
This could be due to multiple things, so to narrow down what is harming your goal conversion rate, make a funnel (see image below). A typical e-commerce funnel would look like this: a visitor browses for products, adds them to cart and checks out. Each of these actions represent a funnel stage. Now you can check at which funnel stage you have the biggest drop-off. For example, if a lot of people add products to the cart, but you see few checkouts, the checkout experience will most likely have a problem.
How do do this:
Google Analytics makes it straightforward to set up these funnels: Just go to the admin area, to “View” and then “Goals” where it will guide you through the process. Once set up, you will be able to see where your visitors abandon the funnel (right image below).
#4 Loading Speed
This is still an important topic despite 4G/broadband internet. An ugly website can still sell things (statistics show that visitors don’t care so much about appearance), but there is not better way to drive away website visitors than a slow loading website (especially on mobile).
There are many tools on the market to test your site (gtmetrix.com, etc.), but Google Analytics actually has a built-in tool that is very useful and easy to use.
How do do this:
This is another simple exercise: Just go to the section pictured below and see which of your pages has a below average loading time (red bars). Are these important pages to you? Then you should improve their loading speed (look at image sizes, etc.).
#5 Bounce Rate
Finally, let’s look at one of the most misunderstood metrics on Google Analytics: the bounce rate.
Most people I meet think this metric has to do with time (“a user leaves my website after 20 seconds), which is wrong. A bounce is a single-page session on your site (Source: Google Analytics). This means a visitor to your website only viewed the page he/she landed on and did not proceed to look at other pages.
This does not have to be a bad thing if you only have one landing page for a campaign, but a high bounce rate should definitely worry you if you have an ecommerce store. Now the next question is: “What is a good bounce rate?”. This really depends, but a general rule of thumb would be that if it is above 60%, you should start investigating.
So how does this relate to our customer experience?
Simple. If you make it easy for visitors to find the content they are looking for and sending the right users from online ads to your website, your bounce rate will be low. Vice versa, if visitors cannot find the content they are looking for, they will leave quickly.
How do do this:
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is look at the overall bounce rate to judge your site’s performance. Start looking at the individual landing pages (where visitors enter your site, which is not always the homepage) and you will quickly see that there are differences. Identify pages with a low bounce rate (even 5% difference can be significant), and try to find patterns why these pages perform better than others. Make them your landing pages for your media campaigns.
Conclusion
Look beyond just numbers and try to imagine yourself in the shoes of the user who is browsing your website and is facing obstacles on the way to their goals. This way you will know which metrics you need to gain insights into their experience on your website. So next time you have to prepare a Google Analytics report, try to tell a customer story and then fill it in with numbers. This will lead to actionable insights that will lead to a better customer experience (and sales ;-).
