Optimisation Report (April 2017) – Google Analysis

OK, I’ve been a bit behind with the focus on Epic Themes (the last optimisation report was based on March 2017’s data).

Through analysing these Optimisation reports, my aim is to chronicle the journey of growing ‘Epic Themes‘ and see how any changes impact Growth.

The laws of maths should apply in that if the number of sessions increase then this should flow through the funnel and increase the number of transactions.

If the number of sessions decrease, the number of transactions in theory, should decrease too. This ignores the ‘quality’ of the lead or any promotions which have been run in a month.

Let’s look at the numbers. Comparing to last months, last months figures in (brackets)

• Sessions 720 (1,130)
• Product Views 462 (604)
• Add to Cart 35 (41)
• Check Out 31 (38)
• Transactions 17 (18)

Giving a conversion rate of 2.36% (1.59% last month). The transactions of 17 compares to 19 in WooCommerce (so Google Analytics missed a couple).

Funnel Analysis

Looking at April’s figures, the main drop again (92% of sessions) is people not purchasing a product. I’ve also been analysing a funnel within Google Analytics which (confusingly) shows 19 transactions (agreeing with WooCommerce). It’s interesting to see how this funnel looks

What I can glean from the above is:-

Around 50% of the visitors hit the shop directly, whereas 50% come from the home page. Weirdly, 99 “exit” to the shop from the shop (I suspect this is something odd in my funnel setup). It’s also difficult to track a ‘product view’ of any Product in Google Analytics.

There’s a similar trend in the exits for cart -> cart and checkout -> checkout so I suspect my funnel is actually performing differently than the numbers suggest

Googling the strange behaviour above, people seeing it before, suggest it’s to do with a page refresh..

So where the funnel should be

• Shop
• Product *wildcard*
• Cart
• Checkout
• Thank You

I’m unable to do this in Google Analytics, and HotJar hasn’t been that faithful (it doesn’t backfill the steps in the Funnel visualisation)

So where should one focus?

With all the competing and confusing funnel data, I’m going to focus my attention on the main Shopping Behavior Analysis tab of Google Analytics and focus on the conversion rate as well as how to improve the number of sessions reaching the checkout page.

There’s no surprises here that there’s still a 90%+ drop off in sessions at the product pages (so people have viewed a product but not added it to the cart).

Rather than make plans in this report, at the end of the May 2017 report (publishing in a couple of days) I’ll be putting up a longer period and (from 1 March to 31 May) and the main focus will be on what that report shows.