by Jim November 17, 2022
Welcome back Rankers. Just been looking over the data for a new client of ours. Tracking progress is important, and I can’t emphasise how important annotating in GA is. Won’t be able to do it soon with GA4 so that’s annoying. Anyway, tracking changes and results helps you home in on what is and isn’t working on the site. From there you can adjust your strategy to improve the poor performing areas. Analysing results means looking at everything sitewide as it’s rarely just one problem you can solve.
What I learned
- The importance of annotations.
- Why GA4 will make things harder.
- Not every change has the same results cycle.
- Why ECR drops for organic.
- Do you know your own site’s problems?
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers. How you going? Work from home hazards, I’ve got to feed the Magpies. And while I’m doing that, have a look at this. That wasn’t a euphemism by the way, more on that video at the end of this one. Anyway, stay tuned.
Are you tracking changes?
Today I just wanted to bring you up to speed on this client we started with about a month ago. It was on the 10th of October. And I’m just looking at the time, I’m comparing since we’ve been on board since the time previous. And you can see here all these little voice balloons here, that’s our annotations, which we won’t have in GA4, which really sucks. We’re probably going to have to do a spreadsheet or something like that. But if you are making changes to your site and you should be, make sure you annotate somewhere, write it down in a diary or something because if something does go wrong, you need to be able to go back and have a look and see where those changes were made.
And sometimes the effect of a change you won’t see for a full cycle of a month. And some of them not even that long, it might take six months. And if you don’t have that written down, you can’t go back and have a look and go, ‘oh that’s the thing’. And it can be very, very small things that you might think are insignificant, but if it’s got anything to do with the way that the site functions or the way that your shoppers use your site, write it down. Really important. And we can see here when we go back and we can see our changes, we can understand why we’re 49% up in our revenue since we’ve started. Now you might think that’s great and we don’t, we estimated we should have been higher than that already. We’re about 5% behind because we keep a running tally of our budgets and we look at them daily to work out whether a client’s ahead or behind.
And of course we like all our clients in the green, we don’t like to see red on our spreadsheet. Now we know this client had problems previously with mobile and they’ve also got a problem with organic. Organic’s starting to slowly come back. And here’s another thing with organic. When it starts to slowly come back, if you’ve taken a big hit in your organic, your e-commerce conversion rate is going to drop for organic. And the reason for that is if you’ve taken a big hit in organic, typically you’re still getting your brand traffic and your brand traffic is going to convert higher than any other traffic. So, when that organic traffic comes back, your ECR for organic is going to drop. That is natural. So, what I’m looking at now is ads because it gives us a really good picture of what’s possible and really easy to look at the difference between desktop and mobile. You can look at it quickly because you’ve got those buttons there.
It’s rarely just one change.
So this is everything, we can see it’s 49% up. So if you go and have a look at mobile, we can see it’s only 5% up in revenue and the e-commerce conversion rate’s only up 15%. Good, heading in the right direction but not stellar. Now we know that this site has a problem on mobile and now we’re absolutely sure that it is mobile that’s holding this site back. Now traffic in comparison, it has more mobile traffic not a lot more than desktop, but desktop is still a significant amount. And when you can look at desktop, we can see desktop is 87% up on revenue, which is fantastic. And we can see our e-commerce conversion rate is up 38% and we can now see that this one campaign down here is up, no is up 95% and it’s converting at 27%.
Now this client was complaining about a 3% conversion rate. Well if you’re looking at everything, sure, but don’t look at everything. That’s not helpful, it doesn’t give you a lot of insight. You’ve got to know and understand where to look and you need to understand what your shop is going through. In this case, all of these changes here that we’ve made, some have been UX related, some have been SEO related, some have been technical stuff, functional things, all sorts of things. And all of them together contribute to this growth, right? Now we know and we can go back and have a look at mobile because we’re sure mobile is the issue. And what we found is some problems with mobile on the product pages and the product pages are really difficult to use on mobile. Now, if you are only looking at your site via desktop and God forbid you haven’t even purchased something using a mobile phone off your own site, then chances are you’ve got some issues you don’t know about.
And I’ve seen site owners tell themselves a lot of things or make excuses about things like, the weather is a real one okay. That is a real problem that some businesses do have and we’ve got clients who are having problems with the weather right now because it’s not *** enough. But there are other things like, ‘Oh my product’s really expensive so people are probably less likely to buy on a mobile’. These are assumptions, they’re not backed by data. So we now know why their product pages are really, really horrible on mobile and we’re going to go and fix those and hopefully next week, it might take a little bit longer, but hopefully next week we’ll have some more exciting data to share and we’ll be back on budget. Because right now we’re not and we’ve got to get back there. If you’d like us to have a look at your site to see if you can grow quickly like this client is, then just email me, [email protected] B-I-Z or [email protected]. Either one will do. Please share and subscribe if you’re on YouTube and hit me up on LinkedIn, that’s where I’m posting a lot of this stuff and hopefully doing some advertising soon on Twitter. See how that goes as well. Thanks very much, see you next week. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
