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Imagine Sam, a marketing manager for a local charity based in London. He’s eager to better understand his visitors and wants to increase his website conversion rate.

Armed with Google Analytics, his two main goals are to increase donations and applications for their apprenticeships. So, where does he start?

1. Define and track your business goals

Given that you already have Google Analytics on your site, through something like Google Tag Manager, we’ll need some way of telling Google Analytics that a user has completed a certain task or action for it then to be tracked.

In our case, both will be a destination goal defined by a user getting to a specific thank you page. Depending on the unique thank you page, Google Analytics will know if the user has make a donation or submitted an application form and track those conversions. It will also act as a baseline to see whether any of our improvements will increase these numbers over time.

• How to set up your goals in Google Analytics
• How to track events with Google Tag Manager

2. Who are your users?

Now that we have our goals in place, let’s now focus on asking questions around your users:

• What devices are they using?
• Which countries are they visiting from?

I’d say having an optimised experience for all users is important, but in this case I’ll be focusing on quick wins rather than a whole redesign of a site. Getting feedback from your users can also be a good addition to using your analytics data too.

To find out which device category is most popular navigate to:

Audience > Mobile > Overview

Now, let’s say your audience is about ~60% for mobile, we might then want want to see which counties these users come from. On the same Mobile Overview page, define a secondary dimension as Country.

From our list of countries we might find we have lots of international traffic from the States for example. Using this sort of data we can make some assumptions on how to improve the conversion rate for these users. Examples could include:

• International, mobile users might need a clearer and easy options for applying from outside the UK
• International, mobile users might want to see internationally recognized payment services like PayPal

These are just some examples. Of course some might ring more true than others but the focus here is to spot where the hurdles are and to take action.

3. How are users connecting with your content?

After looking at who your users you’re getting, you might want to look these:

• Which are your popular landing pages?
• How are users getting to your pages?

To find your popular landing pages, navigated to the follow:

Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages

I’d suggest focusing your efforts on reviewing the top three pages that you find here. While looking at these pages you’ll want to look out for the following:

Page Speed

What kind of page speed are you getting? Use Google Page Speed tool to help find ways to improve your page speed. If a site is slow to load, users tend to give up.

Content Marketing

Is the content clear? Is your content clear and easy to understand? Is there clarity and urgency to your actions?

Visual Design

Are call to actions clear? Does your button or link style stand out as a clickable object or does it blend into everything else?

4. Using your data, implement improvements

Now that we have goals define and we know more information about our users, we can find the problem areas and craft solutions to improve the conversion rate.

Adding tools like HotJar can provide some really useful data through heatmaps, user recordings and funnels. Using all this data can really help spot possible problem areas for your users.

If you’re interested, you can read more about the tools for improving user feedback. I’d also be great to hear how you use your Google Analytics data to increase your conversion rates.