Are you keeping an eye on your checkout? Are your customers having difficulty completing their purchase? Are they distracted during the checkout process?
Many people concentrate only on the front of their eCommerce store. A lot of your time and effort has been spent on SEO and PPC campaigns but this is useless unless your customers can complete their purchase. When was the last time you checked your checkout conversion rates? Do you have anything in place to measure this?
Google Analytics – Goals
Google Analytics provides you with the goals tool to measure how your checkout is performing. If you’ve only been checking the number of sales being placed each week, even if these are meeting your expectations, you could be missing out on a fortune!
With Goals you simply specify each of the mandatory pages in your checkout tunnel, including the final page, the page displayed when the payment is confirmed as successful or rejected. Once you’ve implemented this, the next time you view your Goal in your Analytics account you’ll be able to view the progression of your customers through the tunnel. Using the Funnel Visualisation filter under Goals, you’ll be able to see the number of visitors landing on the first page, the number of those who make it through to the next page and the pages next visited if the visitor did not go to the next page in sequence. Most importantly is the conversion rate – the number of people entering the funnel compared with the number of people completing the tunnel. For online stores, many retailers report conversion rates of 70-90%. However, this rate will depend on a number of factors.
What you need to be looking for, if your conversion rate is low, is where else your customers are going. From each page in the Tunnel Visualisation, if the customer has abandoned the process you’re able to see where they visited next, whether this is within your site or if they’ve exited your site all together. If they’ve exited your site, you need to ask yourself why. Is the process clear for the customer? Are the costs clear? Were there any unexpected costs? Is there a technical problem preventing users from converting? If users are abandoning the checkout but staying within your site, you need to understand why. Is the checkout tunnel distracting? Were they seeking more information about delivery or returns?
Most importantly, this is your opportunity to maximise the benefits of your marketing campaigns. You’ve doubtless spent a lot of time and money getting people to your site and you need to ensure you’re using the tools available to you to ensure you’re maximising your ROI.
If you’d like to speak about this in more detail the please give us a call or email us today. We’ve a lot of experience and success in this area and we could help you too, especially in the run up to the busy festive period.
Call or email us today on 0191 241 6726 or emailus@mancala.co.uk
Steve is Mancala's Operations Manager and also our ecommerce and CMS expert. Steve has extensive experience managing and running ecommerce stores and this wealth of knowledge is passed on to Mancala's clients to ensure that their online store is the best it can be. 
