How to Locate Conversion Rate Issues on Your Website
As nice as it would be to have a perfectly performing website with a 100% conversion rate, we all know that that’s about as impossible as licking your elbow (go on… give it a go…). And while you may think your developers have done a great job and you can’t notice any obvious issues with your site, it’s pretty much guaranteed that your users have. But how do you figure out where there are conversion rate issues on your website? Well, keep on reading and you’ll find out.
First up, we’ve compiled a list of our top five Google Analytics reports to run.
(or Visualization* because Google is American) A conversion funnel is a way of showing how your users move through your sales/sign up/marketing/etc process. What we aim to find out when creating a user funnel is if there are any points of the funnel which are leaking and causing you to lose quality leads or sale volume. Does your check out page leak and cause less conversions? Or maybe people don’t proceed after your delivery information page. To see this info in GA, head to Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualization.
Remember: make sure there aren’t any errors in your funnel setup. If tracking or UTMs are set up incorrectly, there may be missing info in your report.
In addition to using the Funnel Visualisation to see where people drop off in your conversion process, using the Navigation Analysis will show you how they move around your site in more granular detail.
By heading to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages, you’ll see:
Look for the pages which have a high exit rate/low click-throughs to guide you on which ones need more work. Start with your money-makers first, obviously, but also make sure you don’t leave out pages which may seem insignificant.
In the same place where you do your Navigation Analysis, you’ll also find information about your bounce and exit rates for each page of your site. It’s important to understand where those xxx occurs so you can start trying to determine why. Here’s a quick lil guide to determine whether your bounce rate is considered high or low:
Now, a fun fact which we’re sure you’ve figured out – the reasons behind bounces and exits are largely ambiguous and it can be for anything from an error on your site or a CTA button being too far to one side of the page. Oh boy! That’s exactly what you want to hear! The good news is that there are two key elements to look at first if you have a high bounce rate or lots of exits: page load speeds and keywords.
We’ll talk a bit more about site speed further on, so let’s talk about your keywords for now and, most importantly, intent. You may be getting a lot of people clicking through from your keywords but if you’ve got the wrong intent behind them then visitors won’t stay. Google Search Console will show you which keywords are bringing people to your website and will indicate whether you’re targeting keywords with the wrong intent.
In terms of your exit report, you can use it to see where people are exiting during the conversion funnel – eg. if you’re an e-commerce site and you get a high number of exits on the payment page of your checkout process, maybe they’re not comfortable with adding in all of the credit card details and it’d be beneficial to add in PayPal or Apple Pay services. Or, if you’ve got a signup page and people exit once they get to it, have a look for any unnecessary fields you could remove to make it simpler.
Who only ever uses the same browser? Who hasn’t touched Internet Explorer since they had to disable it as their primary browser after installing Chrome/Firefox/other? Us too. But that’s no excuse to forget about other browsers when it comes to optimising for conversions.
To check out which browsers aren’t performing as well as they should be, go to Audience > Technology > Browser & OS. If you see any which have a significantly lower conversion rate, we’re talking more than 2% difference, that’s a good indication there are some bugs you need to take a look at. Using Browserstack or something similar, you can test your website in different browsers without needing to have them all installed.
One of the biggest killers for your website conversions (and traffic in general)… slow load time. We’ve all been there; a page takes more than two seconds to load and we’re out of there like Road Runner. Being able to find those pages on your website means you can work on optimising them to improve their speed, and fingers crossed, keep visitors on your pages for longer.
By looking through Behaviour > Site Speed > Page Timing you can see which of your pages (if any – nice work!) are slow to load. We’re talking anything over three seconds max. Overhaul them.
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Now that you’ve had a look at those Google Analytics reports, it’s time to think more deeply about how your visitors use your website. How do they move through the funnel? Is your checkout process streamlined? Are your buttons and forms converting or blocking? Are there elements which consistently seem to frustrate your visitors?
User behaviour tracking software is incredibly important because it can show you exactly where people look and click on your website’s pages. We recommend looking at VWO, HotJar, Crazy Egg, or Full Story. With their heatmaps and behaviour analytics (like rage clicking), you can see which elements attract your visitors and which elements make them angry. From there, duplicate the good stuff and try to improve the bad stuff.
