How can I use Google Analytics to keep people on my site – and buy?

Let’s focus this week on “goal funnels” tracking in Google Analytics.

Goal funnels are really useful because they allow you to track progress through a shopping cart, for example.

So in the example above, we’re losing 39% or 317 potential customers at the final stage of the check-out process. This kind of information allows you to examine this critical step and understand why people might be leaving.

You can then potentially use tools like www.Kampyle.com to get user feedback as they exit from your site to try and ascertain the reasons for leaving.

You might find it’s something as simple as the delivery cost was higher than people expected, so they left, or there was concern because they couldn’t see/find your company address, so they lost trust and confidence and left.

There are literally hundreds of reasons why people exit your site, but until you conduct some real world user-testing, you’ll never really know for sure.

If you’re seeing people visit the FAQ page on your site during the checkout process, it means you’re not answering a question they have. You must find out which question they need answering and get it on that checkout “step”! (Plug those holes!).

Do this by breaking your FAQs out on to individual pages so you can see which question needs answering the most.

Once you’ve got your conversion rate through the cart sorted as best you can, it can then be time to consider “enclosing” your cart.

What this means is removing all navigation, links out, animations, distraction and noise from your cart process. You’re only supplying the information someone needs to complete their purchase – and that’s it. You’ve discovered all this from testing through analytics, remember!

The information needed to instil the visitor with confidence to complete their purchase is made much more prominent, such as delivery details and customer service contact details, as well as security assurances etc.

It’s also absolutely clear to visitors that they are within the checkout process and how many steps they have left to complete their purchase.

I’m still researching this – I’d like to see some real world data on whether enclosed carts are better or worse than “open carts” – but we are seeing rather large retailers like www.DealsDirect.com.au and www.OO.com.au certainly giving it a go.

And I don’t think they would have adopted the “enclosed cart” approach if it hadn’t been seriously tested against an “open cart” first!

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

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