Optimisation Report (May 2017) – Google Analysis

We’re back again with another Optimisation Report (read the others here). Through these reports my aim is to continue to Grow Epic Themes by seeing what’s working (and what’s not) and optimising the site along the way.

I’m starting to notice a bit of a trend in the number of transactions that are being reported

• Sessions 891 -> (720 -> 1,130)
• Product Views 572 (462 -> 604)
• Add to Cart 24 (35 -> 41)
• Check Out 27 (31 -> 38)
• Transactions 18 -> (17 ->18)

So again, roughly 18 transactions again in the month. My sessions are pretty stable, products views knocking around the 500 mark, with a big drop off of around 90-95%.  Filtering through to better performing cart and checkout pages.

Taking a longer view

It’s no secret that the more data you have the better insights you’ll get. So I’ve done a couple of longer analysis of the data. The first is the past 3 months. This is where I know I’ve not made any significant changes to the Epic Themes website.

Again, the same result is there. Over 90% are leaving the product page without adding to the checkout. What could the reasons be that so many are dropping off. Let’s take a look at the product page for the Plugin Hunt Theme

There’s quite a few things here which I think contribute to the drop off’s in sessions

• Demo site – sessions in Google last 30 minutes, so someone might get timed out of they go to the demo and not come back for a while
• Lack (key) of information – something is missing in the product description (refund policy, money back guarantee)
• Too much information – there’s too much on the product pages (navigation, footer, etc)
• They’ve visited the site and not found a theme for their need (e.g. we don’t sell restaurant themes, or newspaper themes etc)
• Product page focuses on features rather than focusing on benefits of the product.

It could be many things, but from the drop offs, I know it’s something. From the user feedback from email (which I shared in this report) the points above also made an appearance.  Taking an even longer view from 1 December 2016

Again, not a surprise and still a high drop off.

Where from here?

One thing, actually two things are clear from these reports so far. The first is that the Product Pages need some work. Secondly it’s that the number of sessions has been pretty steady (and the number of transactions), however it’s not as bad as it might seem. There has been some improvements. Here’s the table of sessions -> product views -> cart, and transactions going back to Jan 2017.

• Jan 2017 – 761 -> 382 -> 10 (97%) giving 25* transactions and 1.05% conversion rate
• Feb 2017 – 1,222 -> 557 -> 63 (88%) giving 31 transactions and 2.54% conversion rate
• Mar 2017 – 1,130 -> 604 -> 41 (92%) giving 18 transactions and 1.59% conversion rate
• Apr 2017 – 720 -> 462 -> 31 (92%) giving 17 transactions and 2.36% conversion rate
• May 2017 – 891 -> 572 -> 24 (95%) giving 18 transactions and 2.02% conversion rate

Feb was when I did the initial round of optimisations and started to write and publish a lot of Theme User Guides (sharing them each time) and Jan doesn’t appear to have tracked transactions accurately (showing 8 vs an actual of 25).

It’s also worth remembering that the Shopping Behaviour analytics doesn’t marry up 100% with WooCommerce’s data for the same period.

It’s interesting to see the number of sessions and the conversion rate applied to the chart above too (cos, pictures are nicer than words). I’ve also added the $ per sale and the $ per session

This is something I find quite useful to look at. The number of sessions in a month and the revenue in $ per session is something which will be very interesting to see how Paid Traffic Acquisition works and whether I can acquire a session for less than the revenue per session in the table above.

The Action Plan

I’m almost ready to start PPC campaigns for Epic Themes, and it’ll be interesting to see how this type of analysis stacks up after the campaigns have been running and whether they are helping grow Epic Themes. I’ll also be working on a new page design for the Products and this will be run alongside the existing designs (in A/B tests) to measure their conversions.