​Enhanced Ecommerce and Content Sites

We discussed the basics of using one of Google Analytics newest and best features, Enhanced Ecommerce. This addition to the suite of metrics that Google Analytics offers gives your site a powerful new tool for investigating how your users are interacting with your site. We also delve into how enhanced ecommerce can influence the content of your website.

Convert previously went over a webinar from the co-founders of Conversion Works that broke down the reports Enhanced Ecommerce provides. These reports will allow you to quickly show evidence of which pages people are visiting and when they drop-off in the check-out process, allowing you to highlight products and streamline your call to action pages.

However, not all sites are built to sell products, but these sites still have specific conversion goals and need to be able to analyze the behavior of their visitors. Doug and Russell, the co-founders of Conversion Works knew that everyone would be wondering how Enhanced Ecommerce can make a difference with a content-driven site, and they set out to answer that question. Here are the ways that you can manipulate these powerful new tools to improve the conversion rates for your content-driven site.

Sessions

Enhanced Ecommerce, like a lot of other analytics software, is built to display sessions that show product views. The first step in understanding how these analytics can be used in a way that helps us to understand users interaction with content driven sites is through finding the equivalents of ecommerce features on a content-driven site. For example, content-driven sites have sessions too, but instead of product views, it’s about links to other pages or more information. With content-driven sites, it’s important to start thinking about the ecommerce terms that can describe content as well. What is your user’s session based on?

For lead gen sites, where you are anticipating the customer filling in multiple fields, Enhanced Ecommerce can easily adapt to this, giving you data about which forms they fill in first, and which they fill in last. Understanding a user’s journey through the fields will help you to get an idea about how their session is going. Of course, this still leaves a big question for a lot of sites out there: what do you do if consumption of the content the end goal?

[Tweet “Customers with your lead Gen Site: Enhanced Ecommerce can show how to handle each field”]

Signals

In their webinar, Doug and Russell were careful to point out that if the consumption of content is your main point of “conversion” for users, this might seem immeasurable at first, but there are ways to translate the data highlighted in an ecommerce site. It requires some creative thinking, and figuring out which terms and actions on an ecommerce site are the equivalent of actions that occur on a content-driven site. According to Doug:

“On a pure content site, we can still say: ‘okay, someone scrolls beyond 50% if they’ve read at least half of it, half of the article’. That then is the equivalent of the “add to basket”’

Some of the other suggestions from these two conversion masters about new ways to think about content and ecommerce equivalents go beyond how people are reading the content. It’s also important to measure any interactions that are possible:

• How many times are people sharing an article?
• Is there a newsletter they can sign up for?
• How much of an article would people have to read in order for it to be successful content?

That last question can become crucial when determining data for your content driven site. When you understand what makes an article successful, you’ve found the equivalent of making it all the way through the check-out process. From there, you can start to measure who abandoned the page after reading 25% of an article, perhaps the equivalent of someone who put an item in the basket, but then didn’t make it al the way through the check-out process.

Once you have established the equivalents for your content on an ecommerce site, you can begin to filter through data using these advanced technologies, which will we cover in more detail in our next and final post on the benefits of Enhanced Ecommerce for your site.