Online shopping and web-based sales have soared in recent times, in response to the multiple challenges faced by consumers and businesses during the ongoing global pandemic.

If your business has a great website and an ecommerce platform in place, that’s great news. But how do you track and manage the success of your online sales activity? And what are the best ways to boost your sales and improve your online conversion rates?

The answer is to dive into website analytics and the basics of Google Analytics.

Getting a handle on Google Analytics

In the digital world, your company website is your main ‘shop window’, and will be the focus of much of your sales, marketing and social media promotional activity.

If the lion’s share of your sales activity is taking place in the online space, it makes good business sense to get in control of your online success rates and performance – and that means getting your head around the basics of online analytics.

A tool like Google Analytics allows you to keep a close eye on the performance of your website, your product/service pages and your sales as a business. When a potential customer visits your site, that interaction can be measured in three key ways through your analytics:

• Acquisition – your acquisition analytics show how successful you are at getting people to visit your website. Getting viewers to see your links and visit the site is your initial goal, and it’s the key reason you need to optimise product and services pages to deliver the best keywords, search terms and search engine optimisation (SEO).
• Behaviour – your behavioural analytics reflect what potential customers do once they land on your sales and marketing pages. Are they ‘bouncing’ straight off the page, or are they staying and engaging with the content. A high bounce rate is a sign that you need to improve your sales pages and make them more engaging to your target audience.
• Conversion – your conversion analytics show how effective you are at getting prospective customers to click on your call-to-action buttons. For sales and marketing activity, your call-to-action will usually be a ‘buy now’ button or a link that takes you through to an enquiry form. High conversion rates are your goal, turning more online enquiries into sales or enquiries.

Improving your online sales performance

You can take a dive deep into Google Analytics, or you can stay high level and get a more holistic overview of online activity and the performance of your pages – it all depends how granular you want to get, and how much time you have to drill down into the details.

The main concept is to track the important numbers and metrics over time, allowing you to refine your sales approach, or update your online content accordingly.

Some key things to monitor include:

• Which landing pages are getting the most engagement? By tracking which pages are most effective, you can aim to replicate this success across the site.
• Which products/services are getting the best conversion rates? If you know which product types are selling well, you can focus your sales activity in these areas.
• Which social channels bring in the most referrals? If Facebook is bringing in twice the referrals as LinkedIn, you know that you’ll get a better return on Facebook marketing.
• Where pages have the best bounce rates (and why)? If certain pages have high bounce rates, try A and B options and look at ways to improve the content and layout.

If you’re serious about exploring your online analytics, Google Analytics Academy has courses that teach you the basics of Google Analytics to help you understand the data and how you can enhance your online presence.