For online stores, there’s no question: digital marketing and acquisition strategy are the keys to growth. In order to progress in the right direction, acquire new customers and grow serenely, there’s nothing like a good knowledge of your users to improve your acquisition strategy and build customer loyalty.
Where do your customers come from? How did your customers discover your brand? What are they looking for on your e-commerce site?
What are their profiles? What are their paths on your site before converting and making a purchase?
In this article, we explain why and how to measure your users’ behavior.
1. Why measure user behavior with Google Analytics?
If you’re in the middle of a digital acquisition campaign, you’re probably looking to optimize the performance of your campaigns. And among the avenues for improvement is the measurement of user behavior, often overlooked by companies.
And yet, like a giant like Amazon, it’s essential to be aware of your visitors’ expectations and to respond to them. This excellent knowledge of your customers and prospects will enable you to develop further.
Whether you’ve set up Google Ads campaigns, social media, marketing or sales initiatives, your potential customers will arrive at your site through different “gates”, and will most likely be attracted to different products and services.
The behavior and performance indicators of your acquisition levers will be different. And yet your actions all have the same objective: to develop your sales.
The more you increase the number of acquisition channels, the greater the impact they will have on the final conversion. Your future customers will be likely to interact with your various acquisition levers (Google Ads campaigns, your natural referencing, your social media, your emailings…).
Identifying buyer behavior will therefore be very important for investing more in one channel rather than another.
2. Google Analytics: how to analyze your customers’ visits and conversions on your ecommerce site?
In addition to analyzing your social network campaigns or a targeted Facebook advertising campaign, make Google Analytics your precious ally. Google Analytics is indispensable to any successful digital acquisition campaign, and will enable you to study the performance of your acquisition campaigns in detail.
Acquisition channels report in Google Analytics
Enhanced Ecommerce reports from Google Analytics will also enable you to analyze the performance of your catalog, as well as sales by brand, category and product.
Google Analytics can also tell you about video player interactions, downloads and form submissions: anything that can be micro-converted.
Enhanced Ecommerce Report
Of course, it’s a prerequisite that all your tracking and objectives have been properly set up and are feeding back quality data.
To optimize your Google Analytics account, we strongly recommend using Tag Manager to set up your tracking and pixels. A good tagging plan is essential for driving your data-driven acquisition strategies.
We can also help youoptimize your tagging plan with Tag Manager.
3. Keep your goals in mind and track the right performance indicators.
Before studying your ecommerce site’s metrics, take the time to ask yourself the right questions and what information you want to collect to understand your users:
Where do your biggest customers come from?
Do your customers use your search engine to find a product?
Is your new “XXX” brand selling well thanks to your Google Ads campaigns?
Where to start? What should you analyze in Google Analytics?
Every company has its own objectives, which means studying the data that matters to you and that will help you develop your business. So, each of your objectives must be associated with a value in order to understand what it brings you:
Does the number of new creations count?
The number of subscribers to your newsletters?
Clicks on your social networking links?
Number of pages per session?
Time spent on your company website?
Sales generated by your paid search campaigns?
Sales generated by your email campaigns?
Enhance your online offering and products
Being able to track every indicator through Google Analytics will enable you to adapt your offer and your site to your customers’ needs.
It’s not an easy task, but improving the user journey to increase your conversion rate is a powerful lever for increasing your sales and profitability.
You will need to improve or rectify the shopping experience if you find that your key performance indicators are falling or dropping abnormally:
E.g.: the number of shopping cart abandonments is increasing => you need to review your conversion funnel and identify problem pages, or review whether your payment module is no longer functional.
Tracking events and actions on your site plays a major role in your digital acquisition strategy. Clicks on an ad, playback of a new video, sharing of your content, number of uses of your search function…
Everything can be analyzed and used to optimize your site and conversion rate.
Google Analytics lets you analyze user groups and segments
When launching a new product, it’s always interesting to know the behavior of a whole group of people. Cohort analysis enables you to isolate and study the behavior of a given group of users who share a common characteristic, such as their country.
This handy feature is offered by Google Analytics on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
If you keep track of these users for long enough, you’ll be able to find out when they stop being interested in your products or, on the contrary, see how you manage to keep them loyal over the long term.
And to take things a step further, why not link the “Behavioral Flows” report to these groups, to find out more about their habits and see what interests people in these segments and what doesn’t?
Anticipation remains the key to your success
Studying your users’ behavior means above all being able to anticipate future purchasing trends and know what’s working and what’s not.
Each person’s content preferences represent their intentions for you, just like keyword searches on your site’s search engine.
If you have the opportunity, don’t hesitate to combine the power and precision of Google Analytics with direct surveys of your users.
A few quick satisfaction questions can go a long way to helping you improve in the future.