Customise Your Dashboard
Dashboards are the best way to extract the maximum value from Google analytics, so that you can quickly identify what’s working and what’s not. But, getting those insightful pieces of information requires customisation. You want to see all the things that are important to you in one simple report, not an overwhelming mountain of data that will just confuse you. Even better, is that dashboards can be automatically emailed to you and your team at set intervals, giving you a regular heartbeat to your data. Below are six pieces of data critical to your dashboard.
E-Commerce First - Always.
This is a pretty obvious one, but it’s amazing how many people don’t look at the ecommerce information. From here you can see how well your website is performing, the total revenue, transactions and average weight of purchase. The ecommerce conversion rate is probably the most important figure as this tells you how many of your customers are coming onto the website, and end up making a purchase. As an indicator, WordStream say that the average conversion rate in e commerce is 1.84%. Anything above this figure is great.
Path to E-Commerce
Besides just the ecommerce numbers that let you know how you are doing, it is important to know how you got those results. The “how” numbers give you a real insight into what is working and what is not.
Looking at the sessions, users, pageviews and other similar metrics, gives you a good picture as to how your got to those ecommerce metrics. For example, if you are looking at your bounce rate figures and they seem high, you need to think about tweaking your site to get people to stick around and dig deeper. Decreasing your bounce rate should give you a bump in increased ecommerce metrics. It all goes back to the ‘marginal gains’, a 1% improvement in 20 sections of the website will generate a 20% increase.
Visualise the data.
The raw numbers themselves might be a little overwhelming. But using the graphs and charts within analytics, you will be able to easily trends and identify growth (or lack thereof).
As you can see from the Ecommerce graph above, you can quickly identify peaks and troughs in your online sales. Another top tip is to add annotations to your Google Analytics so that you can see why sales peaked on a certain day, i.e., February 28th - Facebook post announcing a big comedian.
Where are my customers coming from?
Now that you now how many tickets you are selling, and how many customers are coming onto your website, the next questions are, where are those customers coming from and how much revenue is generated from each source. As we have a full integration with Google Analytics this a very simple report to add to your dashboard.
Using tools such as Google URL Builder, you can track all your digital marketing campaigns from one place. You will be able to see each campaign, and see if any of them are generating ticket sales (impressive right).
Your checkout funnel.
The checkout funnel is a very important report to add to your dashboard. It quickly shows you how many customers are going through the funnel - and perhaps more importantly - where they drop off the booking process.
Again, tweaking a few things on your site could get more of your customers through the funnel buying tickets.
Desktop, Tablet or Mobile?
Do you know what devices your customers are using when making purchases on your site? This piece of data will allow you to optimise your website for those devices. Luckily, the booking pages of Ticketsolve are fully responsive. Customers on a purchasing from a website on a Ticketsolve platform can book using any device of their choosing (and this is why our customer are seeing much higher conversion rates that the average). Take a look at the platform, devices, browsers your customers are using and use that information to make impactful changes to your your site. You can even see the conversion rates per device as well.
There you have it, those are my tips for creating your dashboard. Obviously there are many more metrics you can look at, but as long as you have the basics, that should give you enough insight to get started. Don’t forget to schedule your dashboards so that they can be sent to you, and your team on whatever day you would like them. But most important, look at the data within the dashboards, and make slight changes here and there to increase your ecommerce metrics.
Like always, if you would like some help getting these up and running, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
