Analyzing the performance of your business website

An eCommerce platform makes it easier to evaluate your business’ performance and understand how your customers shop. If you had a store in a shopping mall, it would be near impossible to count the number of people who visited, how many bought your products, or know for certain how frequently individual customers made purchases at your store. Using a business website builder to create an eCommerce storefront changes this. Not only can you offer a convenient shopping experience for customers old and new, but tools provided by services such as Google Analytics help you to hone your business’ strategy and increase conversion rates over time. So, which vital statistics can provide an invaluable insight into how your website is performing?

Check your bounce rates

A bounce rate indicates the number of people who leave your business’ website after viewing one page, meaning that they don’t click on to see other parts of your site. According to Google, the average bounce rate for retail websites is between 20% and 40%, while analytics expert Avinash Kaushik suggests that levels of between 40% and 60% are perfectly normal. If your homepage was to have a bounce rate of 95%, this would mean that the vast majority of visitors clicked the ‘back’ button of their browser to return to search results, shut down the browser window, or used the address bar to visit a different website altogether. If your eCommerce storefront is suffering from this problem, it could mean that:

• Your website is difficult to use. Customers might not be able to find what they are looking for because the design is cluttered, or the copy on the page is confusing. If they get frustrated, they leave.
• The pay-per-click advertising you are using – perhaps on Google or Facebook – isn’t targeting the right visitors. For example, someone in Australia might click on your ad to buy clothes, but would bounce if they realized that you only shipped to Canadian addresses. This can be avoided by tweaking your ad copy.

Another way to see whether the content or design of your website is working is to use Google Analytics to see how long visitors are staying on certain webpages. For instance, if potential customers are only spending six seconds browsing your homepage on average, you might need to change your site’s design so visitors spend more time seeing what your business has to offer.

Find out which keywords drive traffic

If you have an eCommerce store selling electronics in Vancouver, you might use keywords such as ‘buy iPads vancouver’ and ‘cell phones vancouver’ in paid advertising. However, Google Analytics also provides a list of the other keywords that people had searched for before they visited your site. If you find that 3,000 potential customers found your business after searching for ‘cheap gadgets vancouver’ with many going on to make a purchase, you can then target this keyword through ads and website content so traffic increases.

Once you’ve built your website, remember that it needs constant development and attention to deliver results. Analyzing data using these techniques is just one way to generate growth in your online sales, and attract more customers to browse through your products.