Google Analytics Metrics That Measure Conversion Rate Optimisation Success
Your business has data and analysis — but do you know how to use them? The key to improving your conversion rate is that you need to be looking at your data in order to make better-informed decisions. Analyzing data is like putting together a puzzle; the more pieces you have, the easier it is to see the full picture.
Analysis of analytics data is the first step to any CRO process, and examining different metrics can reveal how visitors are interacting with your site. Once you're armed with this information, it's time to dig into your analytics, figure out which pages are performing well and which ones aren't, and create hypotheses that you can use to optimize the site.
With so much data pouring in, it can be hard to tell which metrics are most important and which ones are the most useful. That's why we put together a quick guide to the metrics you should be monitoring on your website.
While there are a number of analytics tools available and, generally speaking, they all do a great job, for the purpose of this article we'll be taking a look at data found in Google Analytics as this is generally the most commonly used analytics software.
Step 1: Entrances
Where do people enter your website?
An entrance is a term used in web analytics to describe an event when a visitor enters your website from an external source. Among several types of entrance events, you can find “entrance page” and “entrance keyword.” It's important to note that these two terms are not interchangeable! The former is the page on your website a visitor enters, while the latter is the search term they used to get to it.
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Entrance pages or landing pages are the first page a visitor lands on when they enter your website.
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Entrance source is the source of traffic that drives the visitor to the website. This could be from a paid campaign (such as Google Ads), an organic search result, social media, or any other type of external source.
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Entrance Keyword is the keyword a user searches for in Google prior to visiting your site. An entrance keyword can tell you what the visitor was looking for and whether or not they found it on your site.
How Do You Find Your Entrance Pages In Google Analytics?
You can view your most popular landing pages by visiting Behaviour >> Site Content >> Landing Pages
Google Analytics Landing Pages/Entrance Pages
From here, you'll be able to inspect which keywords are sending traffic to each page. Simply click on the page you wish to view the keywords for and then click "keyword".
Google Analytics Page Keywords
Google encrypts Google searches by default to protect user privacy. That's great for the search giant because that means it can't track your searches anymore. But it's a major headache for SEOs who rely on keyword data to inform their strategy. This change in search data affects the keyword data in Google Analytics. If you see a lot of keywords coming up (not set) this is why.
Step 2: Bounce Rate
Identify where you immediately lose users
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who visit a landing page but leave before viewing a second page on the website.
A great bounce rate is one of the first things marketers look for when they're examining the effectiveness of their landing pages. The percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page is a critical statistic because it correlates with the quality of the user experience. A high bounce rate can indicate that a visitor was unhappy with the content or design of a page - perhaps your marketing efforts are not tailored well enough to your content and brand or perhaps your website is slow and people aren't willing to wait around for it to load. There are many reasons why you may have a high bounce rate and it's important to investigate all viable causes.
Bounce rate is calculated as follows:
Bounce rate = # of single page visits / # of entrances to that page
If you have a high bounce rate, it can mean that your marketing strategy is flawed, or your landing page just isn't doing its job. Take a look into your industry standards for bounce rate before coming to conclusions though. Often people think they have a high bounce rate but actually it’s normal for their industry.
Assuming that your site performance isn't an issue, then something else is driving your customers away. Research shows that a lack of information is a key reason why shoppers abandon their purchases and move on to another website. If a customer has landed on your page, they likely have something specific in mind - whether it's to buy an item or get more information about a service. You can improve the experience by addressing those needs as directly and succinctly as possible.
If you want to accurately measure your website performance, you need to take a deeper look at which pages are bringing people in and which ones are sending them running. Don't just rely on your overall bounce rate to figure this out - take a look into the bounce rate of your individual pages and bounce rate by acquisition.
How do you use bounce rate in optimising your website?
There are 2 ways you can utilise bounce rate in CRO. One we recommend and one we don't.
Approach 1 - the one we don't recommend!
If the average bounce rate on your site is 52%, identify pages with a higher than average bounce rate to improve. The reason why we don't recommend this method is that a) some pages will naturally have higher bounce rates than your overall bounce rate - for example, blog pages will likely have high bounce rates due to the nature of search intent. B) you will end up optimising pages unnecessarily. Lets say you have an overall bounce rate of 52% and you identify that one of your case study pages has a bounce rate of 88%. Using this method you will optimise this page. However, this page may have only have had 3 visitors in the last month. Is it worth optimising this page? Probably not.
Approach 2 - the one we do recommend!
Establish a mark for the highest adequate bounce rate on each type of page (for example, your home page, product or service page, blog pages etc). Evaluate pages within each category with a bounce rate above the category mark.
The three things we look at when it comes to bounce rates are:
1. The bounce rate of the home page. Ideally, it should be below 40%.
2. The bounce rate of individual product pages. It should be below 20% for e-commerce and 30% for lead generation site pages.
3. The bounce rate of various category pages (e.g., shoes, dresses, bags, etc.).
Take into account that optimising pages with high bounce rates only makes sense if these pages receive a large number of visitors. Optimising a landing page that has a high bounce rate, regardless of traffic, may waste your time.
Step 3: Exit Rates
The exit rate of a page is the percentage of visitors who leave your website from a particular page after visiting, at least, one other page of your site.
Your exit rate by page indicates where you are losing customers on your website. Effectively it indicates where they are leaving your website.
What use is this in CRO? Pages with higher percentage exit rates may be cause for concern. Similar to bounce rate, some pages may naturally have higher % exit rates than others (for example blog pages) but other pages should have average or lower % exit rates. Look for anomalies in patterns - for example, if your product pages generally have an exit rate of 20% but one has an exit rate of 50%, this may be a page with an issue.
Identify the pages with higher % exit rates as potential pages for CRO. In analytics go to Behaviour >> Site Content >> Exit Pages to view your % exits.
Percentage exit by page
Understanding The Difference Between Bounce Rate And Exit Rate
Bounce Rate and Exit Rate measure different things. Bounce rate is the percentage of users who land on a single page and then leave the site without visiting any other page. Exit rate, meanwhile, is the percentage of users who reach a certain page (after visiting at least 1 other page, ie they haven't bounced) and then leave the site.
For example, if someone sees an ad of yours, goes through to your homepage and then immediately leaves without going to any other page, they have bounced. If they see your ad, go to your home page and then your services pages and then leave, they didn't bounce but they did exit the site on the services page.
Bounce rate: it's how you measure the effectiveness of your landing page design and copy to persuade visitors to remain on the site and take a particular action. Exit rate: it's how you detect breakdowns in process flow on the site.
Step 4: Average Time On Page
The average time on page is a crucial e-commerce metric that shows how long, on average, visitors spend on a particular page. A similar metric is average session duration. Average session duration shows how long on average a user is on your site for, whereas, average time on page shows how long a visitor spends on each particular page.
For example, if someone spends 1 minute on your site altogether, they will have an average session duration of 60 seconds. Average time on page will break this down further to show you they spent 30 seconds on the homepage and 30 seconds on your contact page, for example.
The longer visitors stay poring over the site and exploring its offerings, the better. If users are digging into your products but not making purchases, you might have a problem with your website's navigation or copy. In this case, you need to dive into some user testing or analytics to find out what's holding users back.
To find your average tome on page in Google Analytics, visit "Behaviour” >> “Site Content” >> “All pages”.
Step 5: Conversions Rates By Source & By Page
To be able to complete this step you need to have 2 things 1) an understanding of what conversion rate is and 2) e-commerce or leads conversion tracking set up within analytics. If you are missing conversion tracking you will be unable to complete this step.
Firstly, let’s take a look at what conversion rate is:
“Conversion rate is defined as the number of visitors to a website that complete a desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors.”
For example, if your website got 100 visitors and 10 of these lead to a goal or sale, you would have a conversion rate of 10%.
Different traffic channels will naturally have differing conversion rates. Generally, conversion rates from Google Ads, Google Organic and Direct traffic tend to be higher than referral or social channels.
To find your conversion rates by channel in Google Analytics, go to “Acquisition” >> “Overview”.
Conversion rates by source
Now we know which of our traffic sources lead to the most conversions, we also want to know where on our website these conversions occur. For some websites, you may only have conversion actions that occur on the contact page or the booking page for example. For e-commerce websites, all your conversions may occur at the checkout. It depends on your website and what you’re tracking. If you’re tracking conversions over multiple pages of your website, conversions by page information is valuable to you.
To find this information in Google Analytics, go to “Conversions” >> “Goals” >> “Overview”.
Step 6: Bring It All Together
By now, you should have a pretty good idea of what’s working on your site and what’s not. You can utilise all of the information above to establish which of your pages need the most attention and focus your CRO efforts on these pages.
You can use all of these metrics before, during and after your CRO efforts have been made to measure the success of your CRO campaign.