How to Improve Your Online Checkout with Help From Google Analytics

Have you ever tried to buy something online that you really wanted only to be let down by an unnerving check out process?

This will actually deter buyers not only from purchasing the product from you, especially if they can find it somewhere else, but will also keep them from coming back.

Check out these tips from Google Analytics on how you can spot weaknesses and improve your websites shopping and checkout experience:

Improve customer retention in your checkout by using Goal Funnels

In Google Analytics, you can set up to 20 goals which are pages or events that represent a desired outcome from a customer's visit to your site. Goals can include actions like signing up to a newsletter, requesting a quote or making a purchase. If you have an online checkout, make sure to include the final confirmation (or “Thank You!”) page as a goal page (as this is when an purchase has been completed.) When setting up a goal you can also include the steps or pages that the user has to progress through before arriving at the goal page. In the case of an online store, make sure that every page in the process is listed (e.g. “View Shopping Cart”, “Select Delivery Option”, “Enter Shipping Details”, “Enter Payment Details”.)

Once you have these goal funnels set up correctly, you can view the Funnel Visualization report which gives you an idea of how many visitors leave your checkout process at each step. Steps in the funnel that have a large dropout rate can indicate that visitors may be confused or frustrated with that particular page. Maybe there is new information (like a shipping charge) that scares them off? Or you are asking for information that they are unable or unwilling to provide? Is it possible that the page is just broken? You may want to investigate those pages with large drop-off rates to see if there is some way to make them easier for your customers to complete.

Reduce customer frustration by tracking errors with Event Tracking

If possible, consider putting Google Analytics event tracking in the Javascript error handling code on your site. If correctly set-up, Google Analytics will count the number and types of errors that are shown to visitors. By looking at the Top Events report you can see which errors are experienced most often by visitors. Are these caused by confusion in what the form is asking for? Or is it from something like customers taking too long to complete a part of the checkout? Most importantly, is there anything you can do to reduce the chances of a customer running into these errors?

Ensure consistent customer experience across different browsers

There are a lot of different web browsers out there! When developing a web site, it can be difficult for your developers to test every bit of functionality on every single browser on every type of platform. This gets even more difficult when trying to take into account all of the different mobile browsers as well!

Article Source: Google Analytics

Image Source: lan Liu on Flickr