This post was first published on the Asia-Pacific Conversionroom blog

Michael Fox is a co-founder of Shoes of Prey, an online retail store that allows you to design women's shoes online, which are then handmade and shipped to you. Michael blogs about running Shoes of Prey at the business blog www.22michaels.com. - Ed.

Like most online retailers, we’re always looking for ways to turn our website visitors into customers. We use Google Analytics to monitor the performance of our website and our online marketing and to understand how to make our website even more appealing to potential customers.

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve our website, we recently asked ourselves: which pages on our site are most influential to our customers’ purchase decisions? For example, if someone visits our testimonials page, does that make them more likely to make a purchase? How about watching the videos on our leather page, visiting our gallery, or arriving on our small shoes or wedding shoes landing pages? We knew the answers to these questions would help us maximise the number of purchases from our website.

Custom reports
To start answering these questions, we created a Custom Report in Google Analytics to review the “Highest Converting Pages” on our website. You can make a copy of our custom report setup here and use it with your own site data.



This report shows us three key data points:

1. Pages that people visited (Page column)
2. The number of views each page received (Pageviews column)
3. How many sales (ie goal completions) were generated in that same visit session after visiting one or more of those pages (Total Goal Completions column)

Analysing the data
We then divided Total Goal Completions by Pageviews (on a separate spreadsheet) to discover what percentage of people who visit a particular page end up making a purchase. We assumed that the higher the percentage, the more valuable that page for turning visitors into customers. We could then promote the content on those pages more across our website.


We kept in mind a few circumstances that could impact this data. For example, people visiting our shopping cart or logging into our members area will have a high conversion rate, so we filter those pages out. Customers looking to purchase may be more likely to visit our page about our returns policy. We also kept in mind that we were looking at the same visit session only. Often, customers make multiple research visits before they finally make a purchase. Therefore, we were conscious that there may be other pages that motivate purchases, but are not reflected in our custom report because they were viewed in another session.

After reviewing the data, we determined that our most influential pages were:

1. Leathers page

2. Returns policy page

3. Tab2 - the delivery tab on our product page

4. Customer testimonials page

Taking action from our insights
Knowing our most influential pages has helped us maximise the number of purchases we generate through our website. Once we reviewed the data, we took the following next steps:

• We’re in the process of redesigning our shopping cart, and we’ll look at ways to incorporate this information within each step to reduce drop off and increase conversion rates. For example, we’ll provide information about our returns policy and deliveries within the shopping cart pages itself. This will reduce the need to click away to our FAQ page.
• We’ll also consider making some of this information, especially our customer testimonials, more readily accessible on our home page and custom shoe designer.
• We’ll include some of this information on key search engine marketing landing pages such as our gift certificate page. For example, we’ll incorporate customer testimonials in order to assure those purchasing our gift certificates that they are providing a gift that will be appreciated.
• This will be good information to incorporate into discussions on our Facebook fan page and in videos on our YouTube channel.

We’re excited by the range of insights that Custom Reports provides us. It allows us to slice and dice our data within a single report rather than having to combine separate reports within a desktop spreadsheet. We would love to hear about the custom reports that you find useful for your online business.

Posted by Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics Team

This Wednesday, January 26th, we’ll be hosting a live, online course about Ecommerce in Google Analytics as part of the AdWords Online Classroom (UK).

During the course we’ll discuss how to set up Ecommerce tracking in your Analytics account and enable Ecommerce for your reports. We’ll also discuss implementation techniques such as tracking 3rd-party shopping carts and detail the best reports to use for in-depth analysis of your AdWords activity. This should help you assess your AdWords return on investment and give you more insight into how your advertising is performing in relation to online transactions and revenue generated on your site.

The course will be presented by Analytics specialists and is most suited to advertisers with websites which include the functionality to purchase goods or services. It will take place on Wednesday 26th January from 3pm - 4pm
GMT (7-8 am PST) and will include time for Q&A.

If you're interested, be sure to sign up now!

Posted By Alan Wrafter, Google Analytics Team

Google Analytics does a great job of allowing you to analyse your web traffic through a very important metric: top exit pages. This metric, along with bounce rate and time on site, is valuable as it allows you to measure the impact of changes to your webpages. Did exit rate go up or down? You can choose to optimise pages with high exit rates to try to keep your visitors longer or help them convert, or -- if the page is a logical exit point, you can monetise outgoing traffic on high exit pages by using Google AdSense. (As you may know, Google Analytics and AdSense are integrated, similarly to Analytics and AdWords, so you can optimise your AdSense campaigns using data in Google Analytics.)

If you choose to monetise an exit page, take a look at this short real-world example.

SavetzPublishing.com, on its FreePrintable.net site, provide documents and templates for individuals and businesses, ranging from business forms and certificates, to bookmarks and almost any other document someone would want to print. With sixty-six sites focusing on different niches in printing, Savetz Publishing was looking for a way to optimize their ad placement without having a negative impact on their core users. As a solution, they decided to “find the pages with the highest exit rates and put AdSense on them," according to Kevin Savetz, the owner of Savetz Publishing and FreePrintable.

Kevin has been an Analytics user for as long as he can remember and he had an idea of where the bounce and exit rates would be highest. Kevin used Google Analytics to confirm his theory and placed AdSense ads on some of these pages. He quickly realised that this advertising did not have a significant negative impact on his site’s core users and on conversions. Instead, as he describes, these ads provide “a means of monetising traffic that would already be leaving. My users are still happy and getting relevant content.”

Savetz Publishing’s strategy highlights how sites can use AdSense to monetise traffic that is already exiting the site. AdSense can help sites like these increase overall revenue without changing their current business model. As Kevin put it, AdSense allowed him to “see a huge jump in revenue after targeting exit pages.”

And taking it one step further...As a Google Analytics user, you understand how visitors interact with your website. With this knowledge and the controls in AdSense, you can even structure your AdSense ads to appeal to advertisers who want to display their ads on your site. In turn, you will earn revenue by displaying more relevant and high quality ads.

Here are a couple suggestions to get started with AdSense on your site.

• Try testing AdSense first on your top exit pages, and then evaluate the effect it has on your relevant traffic, by referring to your top exit pages report.
• If, like Savetz Publishing and FreePrintable, you find that adding relevant ads on your site does not turn your relevant traffic away, increase the coverage of AdSense on your site. You can use the additional revenue you earn from AdSense to help you generate more qualified traffic.

Learn more about AdSense and start by testing on your exit pages.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team and Nathan Deoms, Google AdSense Team

Check out this short video to learn the importance of monitoring your AdWords return on investment by tracking sales/leads with Google Analytics. When you link AdWords and Analytics you’ll gain deeper insights that will allow you to optimise your ads and keywords and improve your return on investment.



This is the final video in the optimisation made easy video series. If you’d like to see additional tutorials to help you improve your AdWords account performance check out the AdWords Online Classroom. And for in depth videos on how to use Google Analytics check out the Google Analytics YouTube channel.

Posted By Sara Bonfioli, Google Analytics team