Sooner or later it will have happened to you too to arrive one morning at the office and see by yourself Google Analytics report that the sales of your e-commerce site have had an unexpected and significant decline.
What did you do then? Did you panic? Or you stayed calm and went looking for the cause of the problem on Google Analytics?
I usually go to Google Analytics and look at these 5 reports:
1. Traffic sources, to check if there has been a drop in traffic from a particular channel;
2. Number of pages viewed per session, if they are falling there may be a navigation problem;
3. Number of products added to carts, which can be caused by an assortment problem or a technical problem;
4. Transactions on different types of devices which tells me if the problem was on smart phones, tablets or desktops;
5. Check out funnel, which tells me if there is a problem with the order completion flow.
1) If there was a significant decrease in traffic transactions on the site will likely have dropped as a result and this could be the cause of the drop in revenue. The report that gives you the answer is the daily trend of visits or sessions located in Audience> Overview, if the graph shows a sharp drop in sessions, take a look at Traffic sources it can explain many things, such as how digital and direct marketing campaigns are performing. If until the day before my campaigns brought me X thousands of Euros a day, what changed yesterday? I ran out of budget for campaigns A by chancedwords?
To see if the drop in sales is due to campaigns that are not performing as expected, go to the report Acquisition> All Traffic and then you can either draw the lines that interest you or make a comparison by date, by selecting the option in the calendar: Compare with previous period. The report will now tell you how your traffic sources, CPC, organic, newsletter, are performing compared to the previous period.
If it doesn't work as described you may have to make changes in the tracking parameters of your campaigns.
2) Pages viewed per session: if the visits are stable but there is a decrease in the pages viewed per session, perhaps the interest in the products on your site has dropped or there is a problem with the usability of the site. Maybe an intervention on the site has compromised a button that is no longer clickable. Or that the site suddenly became slow so users find it hard to navigate. a excess traffic on the site could cause just that.
Usually to check the progress of the pages I go to the report Audience> Overview then I choose Pages / session from the selector with drop-down menu (see image)
3) Additions to the cart. If you track cart additions with a event Google Analytics (if you still don't do it here is a good reason to do it) and you see that there is a significant drop in this event, it may be that there is a technical problem on the site or that the stock is running out.
In the first case, unlikely but disastrous if it occurs, the add to cart button no longer works, in the second case it could be that some sizes or colors are out of stock, whereby users cannot find the product they are looking for.
4) Transactions on the different types of devices. When you have a mobile version of the site or a responsive site, it is useful to know if the decline in sales has occurred on all types of devices, on a single category or on a particular model of smart phone.
To see this report, go to Public> Mobile> Overview and look at the column with the ecommerce conversion rate, which shows the percentages for the different categories of devices: Desktop, Mobile, Tablet.
Devices can have gods different average conversion rates depending on device orgeographic area reference, so it is good to have an idea of what are the acceptable average values for your brand.
5) The check out funnel is the last part of the journey in order acquisition, if you have not yet identified the cause of the drop in transactions, the answer may be here. If you have configured this report in Google Analytics, you also know what the percentage of users who on average successfully complete your checkout. If the percentage has dropped suddenly, the answer lies precisely in this path. It could be that your acquirer has had a (difficult) problem or that there is some other technical problem. The best solution is do a full test check out and check what's wrong.
The report is located in Conversions> Goals> Funnel View and it looks more or less like this.
BONUS
Sometimes the decline in sales may be due to external factors that do not directly affect our site: it may be that we are at the end of the month and customers have run out of credit card limits, it may be that users are waiting for the sales or simply that it was a nice day and they went on a trip.
Finally, wait at least one day before panicking, usually if you have not encountered any of the problems listed above it may be that the following day you will see a rebound in sales!
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