Have you ever wanted to ask your customers how they would respond to your new store layout, new product launch, next promotional campaign, or any other aspect of your offering?

Were you really able to test your market in this way, or do you think you can successfully do it next time? You probably can or may have already done so. If you’re in a brick-and-mortar business, the time, effort and money required to conduct this kind of customer survey is both prohibitive and impractical. If you are in a brick-and-click business or 100% online business, you can collect your customer feedback by means of online forms and surveys. But, to what extent do you think your customers will act exactly in the same way they said they would? There are also situations where your customers are not able to give precise answers or accurately predict their behaviour.

This is where you can really count on your web analytics. Below are a number of situations that show how your actual customers’ behavioural data can help you make wise marketing decisions, rather than relying on your own guesswork.

1.    How long will they wait for your shop to open?

Page load time can be a major factor, among others, but it is not necessarily the only contributing factor for a high bounce rate. However, you should ideally take all possible measures to bring down the page load time and see how responsive your visitors are to such improvements. If further improvements don’t result in a reduction in the bounce rate, you know that the issue lies somewhere else.

2.    How many times do they need to try before they buy? 

The purchase behaviours of your customers can be impulsive, habitual, or complex. Knowing exactly how long they take for their purchase evaluations and final purchase is very important when deciding how to measure the success of your campaigns. For example, in businesses where large number of customers make the final purchase seven days after the initial visit, evaluating campaigns based only on the first week’s data can be misleading and unsuccessful. If the purchase time is past 30 days, you’ll need to reconsider cookie lengths.    

3.    What store layout provides the best return?  

When designing a landing page, if you are to choose one each from two different titles and page copies, three different images, and two different call-to-action buttons, you have the choice of twenty-four potential landing pages. Even if you are able to produce multiple test landing pages, how practical would that be in obtaining a sample of your visitors to select the best combination based on their preferences? Even if they select one, that choice will be based on what they like to see, rather than on which option provides the best conversion.  

This is where a tool like Google’s Website Optimizer comes in handy, as it allows you to conduct A/B and multivariate testing while your real visitors are on the site, actually browsing in a real-life situation. The results you see are based on how they behaved on the site with different elements you want to test, rather than on what they think they might do.  

4.    Do your customers leave the checkout queue?  

Your online offering might be the best in the market. It may be priced very competitively, and you may be driving hundreds or thousands of visitors to your site. In other words, your 4P marketing strategy—product, price, place, and promotion—couldn’t be better. However, what if you are converting only 0.5% of your customers, and the rest simply leave the site? How can you find where you are going wrong? Goal and funnel visualisation reports in your analytics will have the answer.

If you have defined the key stages in your conversion path, the funnel visualisation report will show where visitors are joining each stage of the funnel and which stage is driving them away. For example, if you notice that visitors are still moving from the shopping cart to the checkout stage, but then they visit the Terms and Conditions page and exit, the reason could be that you have a very strict return/cancellation policy.  

On the other hand, if the issue is at the product/availability display stage (i.e., visitors are not even adding products to the shopping cart), the issue can be the way you order and display the products. Your most competitive products may be buried in the second and third pages in your display order.  

5.    Do customers browse or simply walk straight out?  

Besides attracting more converting visitors to your website, another important objective of a website marketer is to retain the visitor on the site as long as possible. In the process, you get them to view more pages, so that you can promote multiple calls to action: buy the products, sign up for the newsletter, download the white paper, write a review, share with friends, and the list goes on.  

Many website markers fail to realise that having too many calls to action is no better than having none. When identifying different user types, designing user journeys and page objectives are vital. Your decision regarding how many calls to action to promote on a page should also depend on the “average time a visitor spends on a page”.  

6.    Do you need loyalty cards?  

How do you define loyalty? Is it a visitor visiting the site five times, or the visitor coming back after thirty days? This is an important metric that needs to be defined, based on your business model, type of product, and required goals. The data you need in order to define this metric cannot be directly asked of your visitors.  

With analytics, not only can you easily gather this data, but you also can create custom reports and/or advanced segments, as well as define goals that need to be achieved with your loyal customers. Visitors Loyalty Report and Recency Report can be good starting points to measure your customers’ loyalty, and they can be complemented with some other variables, such as time on site and page views.

 7. In which department stores should you have your concession?

Your visitors will have found your site largely via search engines, display advertising, and/or your email campaigns. At the same time, it is worth finding sources that refer free traffic via blog posts, recommendations given in forums, or free listings included in resources pages.

Although the volume of visitors sent by these sources can be very low compared to your main sources, these referring sites generally send qualified traffic, which will show good conversion rates in your analytics.

In Google Analytics, the report you should look at is the Referral Traffic report in the Traffic Sources section. One good decision you can make from this information is building new advertising partnerships with these sites. Even without any formal advertising arrangements, if these sites can send you qualified traffic that converts well, it is always better to explore opportunities to maximise the traffic volume you can generate from these sites via a well-planned advertising program.

 8.   What’s the optimum marketing mix?  

You may have a large email database of subscribers to whom you may send regular updates, which provide large volumes of sales/transactions. You’re probably less reliant on social media, but invest a fair amount of cash in search marketing. Do you know which customers are exposed to which channel and to what extent? What will be the impact of having your online presence in multiple channels? If so, what is the optimum mix? Which channel initiates the sale and which one closes it?   With Google Analytics’ latest version, you now have the opportunity to visualise the conversion path of your customers from two months before they convert. For example, your customer might have first visited your site through an email campaign. Your PPC ad also might have directed him to the site more recently, but he didn’t buy. This customer was finally convinced to purchase after reading a friend’s review on Facebook.   According to many analytics programs, final click always gets the credit for the conversion, and in this case, it is Facebook. However, your multi-channel conversions report will show you which channel initiated the sale and which other channels assisted in the conversion.

  9.    Are your opening hours right?  

Depending on your product, your customers’ purchase timing and behaviour will differ. If you’re selling holiday deals, for example, you may find that many customers make the purchase after office hours. This might be the case with family holidays, where the research is conducted during the day, but the purchase is made after consulting with family members at home.   However, this may not be the case with a product like a mobile phone, which is an individual decision influenced less by family members and more by work colleagues and friends. So, understanding this behaviour could be very crucial when deciding on campaign timings and aggressiveness. One good report available in your Google Analytics that can help you understand this behaviour is the Ecommerce Conversion Rate by Hour. (Unfortunately, this report is no longer available in the New Google Analytics V5, but it will be a later addition.)

If you know your average daily conversion rate increases by 50% between10.00 am and 2.00 pm, you can and you should definitely bid higher on your PPC keywords to capture more sales during this time. Options like day parting with AdWords are very handy in automating your bid scheduling, so that you don’t have to worry about changing your bids manually.

10.    Ensuring the same great experience for all customers

If you are not technically savvy, it is highly likely that you are relying on your web development agency when it comes to website usability. Even if you are well tuned in to some of those concepts, you may be relying on your own judgments and assumptions rather than determining the exact market condition.  

However, with the reports grouped under Technology & Mobile in Google Analytics (V5), you are not required to be an IT/online marketing expert or to do any guesswork when it comes to making your website fully functional and compatible in all major browser types and versions, mobile devices, and screen resolutions.  

These reports show how many of your visitors are using these browsers and devices, as well as their versions and other settings.   

For example, your web development agency may assume that the latest versions of the Firefox browser are used by the majority of your visitors (version 5 and above) and, when ensuring the browser compatibility of your website, they may concentrate only on the latest few versions. However, your analytics may reveal that version 3 and its subversions are the second most popular version, and that you need to work with your web development agency to ensure that your site is still compatible for those older versions as well.

You also need to make sure that your visitors can complete all calls to action, including purchases, without extra effort or clicks under all popularly used screen resolutions.  

For example, the report below shows a large number of visitors view the website with a 768x1024 resolution. However, its contribution to transactions is significantly disproportionate. Could this be because they cannot find the call to action in this resolution?