Using GA to make CRO decisions

The most common question we get asked by B2B marketers starting on their CRO programme with personalization is “Where do I focus to make the most impact?” The B2B website is such an important part of the buyer journey and presents so much opportunity to increase conversion that the huge potential can almost be paralyzing. We don’t know where to start so the easiest thing is to do nothing. And herein lies our first mistake…

The good news is that the answer to what can seem like a really difficult question is actually already at your fingertips – in Google Analytics. Plus, if you’re anything like me, you love making data-driven decisions – in fact, it’s a necessity in our roles today so this blog is designed to help you to find what you need to take the first steps in your CRO (conversion rate optimization) journey.

Going wide with the data first helps you to make changes that are going to impact the most visitors, you can then go more narrow, as you start to segment your campaigns, looking at elements like industry and personas. For now let’s start at the top.

The first decision you need to make is which pages in your buyer’s journey are having the most influence. In fact, when looking at those pages break it down into 3 major topics.

1. Reach
2. Impact
3. Opportunity

Starting with Reach, use the data in your GA to establish your top 10 pages in terms of highest traffic volume. Put these in a list and score them 1 to 10 with the highest traffic getting a score of 10 and the lowest of these top ten pages getting a score of 1.

For impact, look at measuring conversions through each page and establish the top 10 pages for conversion influence. It’s important to note two things here – first of all, these are the top ten pages that visitors who converted viewed – they don’t have to have converted on this page. Secondly, make sure you are doing this based on the conversion that is most valuable to you, us marketers like to measure A LOT and a content download clearly isn’t the same as a demo request. Once you have these pages put them in another list (you should probably start to use a spreadsheet for this) and order them 1 to 10, 10 being the page with the highest impact on conversions.

Next for opportunity, you’re actually looking at the pages that are letting your journey down, those that are causing the highest drop off. For this take your top 10 converting pages and look at those with the highest exit rate, this time the highest exit rate gets the top score of 10 and the lowest a score of 1. Once you have all this data, list all the pages with a score next to each other on a grid that looks something like this:

Page prioritization example

You can then total these scores to create a total score for each page. The highest scoring page becomes your top priority for focus first, so at least you know exactly where to start.

They are pages with a high influence over conversions, decent traffic and yet higher bounce rates. Those factors combine to make these the pages with the biggest opportunity.

Customers of Webeo supplement this data using our personalization opportunities report. While GA gives you an aggregate view of everyone visiting, Webeo breaks this page data down by industry so you can make an informed decision which supports the journey of your ICP. Overlay this data on top and you’ve got all the insight you need on where to focus. This is the quantitative part of your CRO planning.

Now the next big question is “what should you focus on?” the qualitative start of your CRO data analysis. Using a heatmapping solution like Hotjar (there is a free version if you are starting out) will give you some great insight to make these decisions, but this isn’t something we should bolt on at the end of GA and there are a whole bunch of other tools that will support this which we will cover in another blog. So… we can leave you with some homework before then, best dig out that GA log in!