10 Google Analytics Reports To Grow Your Conversion Rate

Are you still looking for the best practices to help you improve your website? Is your team still A/B testing button colours and headlines over and over again, based on clues they find on the Internet, only to find the changes deliver you nothing more than a few percentage points increase in your conversion rates? Are you sick and tired of getting just reports from your Google Analytics instead of valuable business recommendations?

Then it’s time to start over.

Listen to your data. Use these 10 Google Analytics hidden gems to get the most out of your data and come up with a great testing hypothesis to test them.

In this white paper, we will show you how to leverage your data to find ways of increasing your conversion rates and get more sales (or leads) – as well as how to find hidden gems in your Google Analytics. Some of these gems are hidden behind additional implementations but most are available in your “standard” reports. Here, we dig them out for you.

We also share with you the knowledge we have gathered over more than 5 years and give you 10 proven ways to boost your analyses using data from your Google Analytics account. No useless theories. At every step we will show you how to make a real impact on your business. It’s time for action.

If you don’t have time to read this guidebook now – save it for later! Download it in PDF format as a part of Ultimate Conversion Rate Optimization Toolkit, which also includes two other guidebooks: 24 Secrets of Insanely Effective Landing Pages and 5 Powerful Qualitative Methods That Generated Milions For Our Clients.

1. Use page scroll tracking (especially) on landing pages

What: measure your user engagement in every section of your landing page
Sample hypothesis: people are more interested in testimonials than the company history – so let’s move them to the top of the page
Impact on business: lower bounce rates and more engagement with the content

Many marketers still follow the myth that “short copy sells better”. But it’s not always the case: some products need more detailed, longer copy – for instance if your goal is to educate users. Luckily, you don’t have to just guess whether long or short copy is better or where exactly to put your copy section on the page. You can track your user engagement and decide what works best for your users.

As we all know, users cannot interact much with landing pages. In its standard configuration, Google Analytics measures only pageviews and since there is only one page we cannot see how users interact with the landing page. On top of that, when a user visits the site but does nothing except read through the whole landing page – this visit is recorded as nothing more than a simple bounce session. This means we know nothing apart from the fact that a user was on the page.

However, with the help of scroll tracking we can tell how far within the page a user has scrolled. And this is a great indication about what content is interesting to a user.

Behavior > Events > Overview > Scroll Depth > Event Label
You can use Google Analytics events to track page scrolling (you can use one of many available scripts for it e.g.by Justin Cutroni.

The above report shows how far (in percentage terms) the page was scrolled. Combining these event metrics with other Google Analytics reports (such as conversion rates) shows you if there is any correlation between visitor types and scrolling behaviour. Are there any particular areas of the site that generate more scrolling activity? Do certain traffic sources lead to more scrolling than others? Setting up events is just the beginning of very insightful analysis.

Do you want more data about your landing page copy?

Use Google Analytics virtual pageviews to separate the page into distinct page sections and measure the time spent on every section on a landing page.

Behavior -> Site Content -> All pages
You can compare time spent and % exits for pages on particular sections. When you know how users interact with copy on a particular site section, you can easily optimize it. For example, you can move more attractive content to the top or change the location of a form. Or just get rid of unpopular sections.

All you have to do is to send a virtual pageview together with an event which is generated after the scroll. In addition, you can configure a funnel report and look for bottle-necks within your content.

If you don’t have time to read this guidebook now – save it for later! Download it in PDF format as a part of Ultimate Conversion Rate Optimization Toolkit, which also includes two other guidebooks: 24 Secrets of Insanely Effective Landing Pages and 5 Powerful Qualitative Methods That Generated Milions For Our Clients.

2. Tackle Your Form Abandonments

What: measure every interaction between your forms and your users
Sample hypothesis: improve the validation of the “e-mail field” on the forms
Impact on business: higher conversion rate on forms

On a landing page, your main goal is to make users submit a form. This isn’t easy: people do not give their personal data away just like that. Rule of thumb: the fewer the form fields, the better. In fact, some research has suggested that conversion rates improve by almost half when the number of form fields is reduced from four to three.

Mind you, removing all of the form fields is never an option.

Unfortunately, fewer fields also mean you get less information that your sales team can act on. When you strip additional fields from your forms, you may increase the conversion rate on the landing page, but your sales team may have much more work to do in order to close each deal. There is a trade-off between the information needed by your sales department and the data that users are willing to share. To get more conversions you have to make sending out the form as easy as possible.

That is why it is extremely crucial to track landing pages – and especially forms – more accurately. For sure, we would like to know the following things:

1. How many users have been on a site? Actually, we already know this thanks to pageview which was generated after page load.
2. How many users started filling the form?
3. How many users abandoned the form and what was the last field they left from?
4. How many users submitted the form and whether the submission was correct (no validation)?
5. If there is a validation – which fields were filled incorrectly?
6. What caused the wrong validation– was a field just empty or filled incorrectly?

In order to get know the answers, we need to implement additional tracking.

First of all, we should track the start of anyone filling out a form. This is very simple because we just send an event when a user activates any form field. The easiest way is to use automatic click tracking rules in Google Tag Manager. You should send the following event to Google Analytics:

ga(['send',’event’,’form','name of a form','form start']);

<name of a form> is simply the name of a form you are tracking – you probably have more than one landing page hence different forms.

While keeping track of what fields in the form are being filled, you should also send a virtual pageview for every field. Thanks to this, you will be able to build a conversion funnel and analyse which field is a bottle-neck in the form filling process.

ga(['send',’page’,’<form url>/<field name>']);

<form url> is the URL where the form is located and <field name> is just a field name – it could be just a number indicating the order in which the fields are filled out by the users.

When a user submits a form, you should send two types of events depending on whether the submission was ok or not.

for correct validation:

ga(['send',’event’,’form','<name of a form>','form send ok']);

for incorrect validation:

ga(['send',’event’,’form','<name of a form>','form start not-ok']);

If there is an incorrect validation, together with the above-mentioned event there should also be sent separate events for any fields which caused the incorrect validation. There are two main reasons why a form submit might be stopped (incorrectly validated): some fields may have been filled out wrongly or just left empty when they were obligatory. In those cases, you should send the following events:

for empty fields:

ga(['send',’event’,’form','<name of a form>','<field name>: empty']);

for incorrectly filled fields:

ga(['send',’event’,’form','<name of a form>','<field name>: error']);

<form field> is the variable defined in every form field.You will need to define and send an event for every field of your forms – from the action of activating the first form field, right through the filling out of the subsequent fields, to the point when the user clicks the submit button. At this point you should also quantify whether the attempt to send was successful or not.

Because you are sending an event for each wrongly filled-in field – you will now be able to get the whole picture and as you will know at which points the form was not properly validated – and as a result not sent –you will know these are the possible points where users are leaving.

Although each step a user takes is measured in a similar way – you should act on the results in different ways.

User didn’t start to fill in the form
The fact that users did not even start filling in the form can leave you with no doubts. If there was not even a single click, without hesitation we can say there must be a problem with the content or message. You will need to make it more attractive and persuasive.

User filled in only one field
When there is a significant drop in the number of users who filled in a field but not the field below – there must be a problem with the latter field. Maybe it is too personal or described in an unclear way? The same goes for the fields that are filled-in wrongly and are stopping the validation of the form.

User made a mistake

Behavior -> Events -> Event Action
You can track field errors, and start to optimize it immediately. On the screen you can see that the most problematic field is “phone number”. Maybe a description of a field is so unclear to users that they are making the same mistakes over and over again? Or your validation is poor?

User succeeded / failed to send a form

Behavior -> Events -> Event Action
To get actionable data about form sending you can measure the sending rate: Succeeded sending / Total amount of Succeeded and Fail attempts. In this case the “sending rate” is 90,1%, so it’s pretty good – but there is still room for improvement. Knowing how many users succeeded in sending the form, and how many failed, you can start to work on improving your sending rate.

To see how many times users attempted to fill in your form, you should look at Total Events versus Unique Events. On the screen above you can notice that users are struggling to fill in a form – on average, every user tried to fill in the form 1.3 times a session. This means that users were trying to send a form, but they were not able to do it at the first attempt. Why? Your validation is probably wrong, and they don’t see the error.

To sum up: you have to track every interaction between your users and your forms. Why? If your users have a problem with the validation of a form, you might lose your chance to get their data.

If you don’t have time to read this guidebook now – save it for later! Download it in PDF format as a part of Ultimate Conversion Rate Optimization Toolkit, which also includes two other guidebooks: 24 Secrets of Insanely Effective Landing Pages and 5 Powerful Qualitative Methods That Generated Milions For Our Clients.

3. Get a quick win with technology & devices

What: technology check
Sample hypothesis: my website has poor usability at resolution 1920 x 1080 and I have to fix it immediately
Impact on business: elimination of technical obstacles that are keeping users from your site

The simplest mistakes made by website managers are usually connected with the compatibility (or not!) of the site to the different tools that connect to it. Identifying technological issues is one of the fastest ways to improve your site’s conversion rates.

If you are looking for low hanging-fruits, start with the “Technology” report in Google Analytics. You should focus on Screen Resolution and Browser. Comparing the bounce rates and conversion rates will give you good hints about web design problems you cannot ignore.

Audience > Technology > Screen Resolution -> Bounce Rate compared to site average
This report shows us that screen resolution 1920×1080 has a much higher bounce rate than other resolutions. This should set alarm bells ringing! It’s time to tweak your page to make it look better on a bigger screen.

Audience > Technology > Browser -> Bounce Rate compared to site average
You should also check similar reports for Browser. If you notice that popular browsers (like Firefox or Safari) have bigger bounce rates compared to the site average, you definitely have to fix the problem and tweak your pages for particular browsers.

In addition, according to statistics, mobile devices comprised almost half of all traffic from June to November 2014, with 52 percent coming from desktops and 48 percent from mobiles. Mobiles are still gaining strength and becoming a significant part of online business. So you will need to take care of your mobile and tablet users.

So, if so far you have been ignoring mobiles – it’s time to change. Good news – even small changes can give you conversion growths.

Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages; segment “Mobile and Tablet Traffic”.
Check which pages have the biggest % exits. No time to lose: you have to find a reason why people are abandoning your site at those particular pages (for example using the qualitative methods you find here).

When it comes to data analysis you have to use segments, otherwise your insights are not worth a dime. Segmentation mobile versus desktop is a must. There is no need even to create these segments; they are already set up on your account. You simply choose “Mobile Traffic” and “Tablet and Desktop Traffic”, then “Apply”. Your report will show its data in the context of these two segments.

If you don’t have time to read this guidebook now – save it for later! Download it in PDF format as a part of Ultimate Conversion Rate Optimization Toolkit, which also includes two other guidebooks: 24 Secrets of Insanely Effective Landing Pages and 5 Powerful Qualitative Methods That Generated Milions For Our Clients.

4. % Exits

What: where my traffic leaks
Sample hypothesis: our USP is crap on website x. We have to improve it
Impact on business: fewer number of drop-offs, more sessions that convert

Every site is like a funnel where at the top come the users and at the bottom end those who have converted. On the way, there are obstacles which do not allow your users to reach their goal. These obstacles are like holes in the funnel – water is pouring out before it gets to the end. The % of Exits will indicate which pages are those holes.

A high exit rate on a specific page should be a red flag for you. Be aware of this metric. If your visitors are leaving a particular page for no good reason (such as achieving a goal in the case of a contact page) – you have to find ways of fixing it. Decreasing the exit rate is like plugging holes in a funnel.

Behavior -> Site content -> Exit Pages
The page in the group “Poradniki” should alarm you: users are visiting those pages and leaving your website. They probably have a problem with the navigation (maybe they can’t quickly find the way to the product site). This needs to be resolved – for example by giving additional clues about how to add a product or continue shopping.

Identifying a problem is just the very first step. You have figure out why specific pages are having a large % of exits. Maybe your Unique Selling Proposition is weak on these pages? Or the pages are a dead-end for users, who don’t know how to get back to your shop?

Behavior -> Behavior Flow -> Landing Page
You also want to look at the paths users took through a site before dropping off. This will help you to discover what pages led them to the exit pages. To drill down, you should check Behavior Flow. Notice that there is a large drop-off of visitors on the Whitepaper section. After getting free e-book, visitors are leaving the website. You should focus on getting them back – for example by improving the USP.

Note that not all of the exit pages are inherently bad. For example, on an ecommerce site the ‘thank you’ page will be a great exit page. It means someone purchased, which was the desired action.

And not only that: you can monetize your exit pages and get more profits by placing AdSense on the top exit pages (more in Analytics blog)

If you don’t have time to read this guidebook now – save it for later! Download it in PDF format as a part of Ultimate Conversion Rate Optimization Toolkit, which also includes two other guidebooks: 24 Secrets of Insanely Effective Landing Pages and 5 Powerful Qualitative Methods That Generated Milions For Our Clients.

5. In-page Analytics

What: In-page Analytics: browser size
Exemplary hypothesis: There is too much white space on intersections so users don’t realize that they should scroll down a page to the most important information underneath
Business impact: lower bounce rates

Some people say the more white space there is on a page, the better. Others claim that every little bit of space should be used. Who is right? Users are! They leave you their opinion through interacting with the page. But what do they actually see?

In-page Analytics is a great mine for hints on conversion rate optimization. You get a picture of how people are using your website (what they click, how deep they scroll or which part of the website they see most). Our pro tip is to look at the percentiles in the Browser Size report. Ultimately, first impressions count the most.

Behavior -> In-Page Analytics -> Browser Size -> Show percentiles
When designing a page you have to be extremely aware of these orange lines. You can see in the illustration that there is a point where they culminate. Many users see these lines as the bottom of a page. If you leave white space there, which is very common on websites we have optimized, people may not realise there is more content below. They won’t scroll down the page – and they won’t for example see your form. Or they bounce away from the website straightaway. Don’t lose conversions in such a dumb way!

Don’t get misled by myths like “there is no fold”. There is no doubt that users scroll now more than they did before, and putting important things below the fold is not a big deal anymore.

But still – if users think the page ends on a particular line, there is a chance they won’t keep looking for more content and won’t scroll down. They might just leave the page.

If you notice that your landing page has a high bounce rate, one of the reasons could be the fact that important information is hidden under the fold. You will certainly be able to validate this hypothesis in this report!

If you don’t have time to read this guidebook now – save it for later! Download it in PDF format as a part of Ultimate Conversion Rate Optimization Toolkit, which also includes two other guidebooks: 24 Secrets of Insanely Effective Landing Pages and 5 Powerful Qualitative Methods That Generated Milions For Our Clients.

6. Site speed is a conversion killer

What: find the slowest pages – conversion rate killers
Sample hypothesis: it’s crucial to improve the side speed on the checkout
Impact on business: higher conversion rate

Speed is a killer: increasing the page load time can extremely kill your conversion rate.

According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online (Source: KISSmetrics).

Behavior -> Site Speed -> Page Timings -> Avg. Page Load Time compared to site average
Identify the slowest pages on your website. If they are very important, like your homepage – you have to take immediate action to improve site speed (for instance through all unoptimized images which might be affecting the page loading).

Behavior -> Site Speed -> Overview -> Browser
Another great thing about the page speed overview is the ability to break down average page load time by user types. Possible choices are Browser, Country, and Page. For instance: knowing that more that 70% of your traffic uses Chrome, how can you allow such a poor site speed on that browser?

Behavior -> Site Speed -> Suggestions
If you click Page Suggestions, PageSpeed Insights will open in a new tab. Google Analytics gives you suggestion on how to increase the speed of every page. Make use of it: the hints are clear and actionable.

There is not usually a lot you have to do in order to improve your page load times. Since they have a tremendous impact on your conversion rates, you have to first know where you should look for clues about what works and what does not. So use the site speed reports!

If you don’t have time to read this guidebook now – save it for later! Download it in PDF format as a part of Ultimate Conversion Rate Optimization Toolkit, which also includes two other guidebooks: 24 Secrets of Insanely Effective Landing Pages and 5 Powerful Qualitative Methods That Generated Milions For Our Clients.

7. Hourly Conversion Rate

What: conversion rate hour by hour
Sample hypothesis: we have to dim the brightness of our website layout
Impact on business: higher conversion rate, lower bounce rate and % exits

Have you ever analysed your traffic and conversion rate hour by hour? No? I thought not.

Ecommerce -> Overview -> Hourly
This is a real hidden gem: hourly analysis. You can discover whether your design is harming your conversion rates or not. You should check your traffic and conversion rates hourly (the best every week day plus weekend data).

When working for a client, we tried many tricks to decrease bounce rates. Although we succeeded to some extent, we still weren’t satisfied with the results. So we kept on drilling in the Analytics account for insights.

We analyzed the conversion rates and the traffic hour by hour and we discovered that users buy games mostly at night. Then we came up with the idea: maybe white design in the darkness just made people’s eyes hurt. Bingo! Changing the layout for something darker brought substantial lifts in conversion rates and decreased bounce rates.

We have proved this idea many times in many A/B tests: white design for day, darker for night. Check if you are making this mistake – it could be costing you conversions.

If you don’t have time to read this guidebook now – save it for later! Download it in PDF format as a part of Ultimate Conversion Rate Optimization Toolkit, which also includes two other guidebooks: 24 Secrets of Insanely Effective Landing Pages and 5 Powerful Qualitative Methods That Generated Milions For Our Clients.

8. Internal Site Search

What: internal site search terms analysis
Sample hypothesis: we have to add delivery times on the order summary page, because people are looking for it in the search box
Impact on business: fewer % search exits and more conversions

Internal site search is an amazing peek into customer intent (while remaining still in quantity data). What’s more, on average, the conversion rate for visits with site search is usually twice as high as visits without site search. That’s why you should keep a beady eye on internal site search: every error or inaccuracy can cost you a conversion.

You should analyse the site search for two main reasons:

1. To provide the best search quality (remember – if your users find what they are looking for on your website, they are more likely to convert)
2. To find bugs and flaws on your website and improve them immediately

Behavior -> Site Search -> % Search Exits compared to site average
% Search Exits is the search equivalent of Bounce Rate. It tells you how many people left your site after performing a search, which in turn can tell you if the search was useful. You need to fix it by working on your site search quality. For example: 380 users were looking for a bike, but after seeing the results page, 80% of them left immediately. There is definitely something wrong going on there. Maybe for a “bike” search term they got irrelevant results, such as books about cyclists?

Behavior -> Search Terms; second dimension: Start Page
Add a second dimension Start Page to discover where on your site your users are starting to use internal searches. If it’s the homepage, you shouldn’t get worried. Some users just know very well what they want, and they just put it into the search box.

What should alarm you is if it is the checkout page. If users are initiating searches from your conversion funnel, then you know something is wrong. They are going all the way to the checkout but are still missing the information they need – for example delivery terms. Don’t let your conversion funnel leak – provide users with all of the information they are looking for on the page. Don’t make them look for it – they may never come back!

If you don’t have time to read this guidebook now – save it for later! Download it in PDF format as a part of Ultimate Conversion Rate Optimization Toolkit, which also includes two other guidebooks: 24 Secrets of Insanely Effective Landing Pages and 5 Powerful Qualitative Methods That Generated Milions For Our Clients.

9. Related products API

What: related products analysis using API
Sample hypothesis: we can get more revenue offering products x by selling product y
Impact on business: more sales = more profit

You don’t have to use your intuition anymore when it comes to up- and cross-selling. You can measure it and take your decisions based on data from your Google Analytics. Which is fantastic!

To extract this data from Google Analytics you have to use API. The best choice is Google Analytics Query Explorer – it’s easy and has a really nice, intuitive interface.

To get data about related products, follow this screen shot. Add a Google Analytics Account. Set up the metrics (ga:relatedProduct Quantity; ga: query ProductQuantity; ga:correlationScore) and dimensions (ga:relatedProductId; ga:queryProductName; ga:relatedProductNamel ga:queryProductId). Sort the results by CorrelationScore and filter them by Product Quantity > 20.

You can get really actionable results which you can use to cross sell your products effectively. You should suggest the most closely correlated products together e.g. in the basket.

But how can this data be used to drive value? You could present related products on a website with special offers for those who have already bought a particular product (or have it in the shopping cart already). Try to send targeted e-mails with very special discounts for related products. The sky’s the limit: it’s really useful to know what your customers are likely to buy next.

Last but not least

If you want to get the most out of the conversion rate optimization process, you can’t nitpick on every single site. To be super effective you have to pick your priorities and work on the pages that matter for your company revenue.

Here is a quick framework you can use if you have any doubts about what you should choose to optimize in the first place. Focus always on pages (1) that generate the most revenue for your website (2) have the biggest traffic (3) have big problems so fixing them can give you great results.

If you don’t have time to read this guidebook now – save it for later! Download it in PDF format as a part of Ultimate Conversion Rate Optimization Toolkit, which also includes two other guidebooks: 24 Secrets of Insanely Effective Landing Pages and 5 Powerful Qualitative Methods That Generated Milions For Our Clients.

10. Test it all with API Google Analytics Experiments

What: using API for Google Analytics Experiments
Exemplary hypothesis: all based on former analysis
Business impact: 100% certainty about conversion rate differences

When you finally discover what works and what doesn’t work within your site – and come up with recommendations about how to fix those aspects that do not work – it is time to test your hypothesis. It’s time for A/B testing!

Google Analytics Content Experiments (GACE), which is a free A/B testing solution implemented inside Google Analytics, is great for conversion optimization newcomers.

Behavior -> Experiments

Its basic functionality is, however, a big obstacle when running tests on complex websites, such as e-commerce sites. The good news is that you can easily leverage its potential by using API and some basic knowledge of Javascript.

Behavior -> Experiments (create a new experiment, step 3)
If you look at the standard GACE code, you may notice that the first part of it is responsible for allocating users to certain versions and creating a cookie. The second part is redirecting users to proper URLs.

You can leave only the first part, so the engine will allocate versions, and then write custom javascript that will for example change elements on the website with jQuery instead of redirecting to a different URL.

This is just a simple example of the kind of modifications you can implement in GACE script. You can read more about its API here and make your own, customised tools for A/B testing. And this is absolutely free of charge.

Summary

We have shared with you our incredible actionable hidden gems in Google Analytics. We use them on a daily basis to help our clients achieve more and more conversions and increase their revenues.

Now you can follow our special framework step by step and get the most out of your Google Analytics. These hidden gems will help you leverage your data to boost your revenues. We have spent years realizing this potential. And you have just got it for free.

Now you can focus on actionable data and proven techniques to improve your websites and make more money.

No more useless reports. No more worthless data. No more random hypotheses.

So don’t waste time. Boost your revenue with Google Analytics using these 10 incredible actionable analyses now. It’s time for action.

If you want to leverage the full potential of digital analytics, make the most of your data and boost your profits with conversion rate optimization – contact us now to learn our approach.