Do you spend your time on the right things when working on your online store? Do you publish content that is important to your customers? Are you focusing on the things that have the greatest effect? Using good analysis tools can help you answer such questions. A continuous and targeted analysis is important for identifying areas of problems and improvements. It provides good indicators on what is working/not working and what you should focus on, and gives you a good basis for making the right decisions when it comes to your online store.

Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool used to get detailed statistics about a website.  By using Google Analytics you can for example find out: 

• Who are the users on your website
• Where are the users coming from 
• How the users navigate your website
• Users shopping behavior

Data from Google Analytics can give you an overview of what challenges the website faces, but not necessarily what is causing these challenges. Statistics from Google Analytics can for example show that many users on your website drop off on the product page and in the checkout process. What could be the reason for this? Why are so many users not completing the purchasing process? It can be challenging to know how you should tackle these issues.

Hotjar

A good option is to use the visual analytics tool Hotjar in combination with Google Analytics. Hotjar helps you understand the user's behavior on the website. What are the users actually doing on the website? What content is important to them? By using heat maps you can see where the users click and how they scroll through the pages. This can help you understand why users behave the way they do and can give you directions on where to start your work.

For example, by looking at how the users behave on the product page, you can see if you find any explanations for why so many drop off on this page, and why they don’t add products to the shopping cart. You can see where the users click, how far they scroll, and how they interact with the different elements on the page. Based on this information you can A/B-test different solutions, make changes, and subsequently test the effect of these changes.

By doing Hotjar analyses regularly you can get useful information such as: 

• What content you should focus on/not focus on 
• Where you should place your most important content 
• Whether users have desired behavior on your site
• Whether important elements such as buttons, links, and CTAs (calls to action) are effective 
• Whether the site should be better adapted for desktop, mobile, or tablet

Briefly summarized 

Actions based on findings from Google Analytics and Hotjar can lead to fewer drop-offs in the purchasing process, more page views, improved design with lower bounce rates, and better conversion rates. The analyses also give a good basis for A/B-testing of different solutions on the website. The analyses are easy and cheap to implement, and if you know how to take advantage of these tools, they can provide great insight and effect, so you can take action that improves your online store. In this way, you ensure that you have the highest return on your editorial efforts. 

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need tips or help to conduct such analyses! We would love to hear from you.