The Malt Miller: analytics

As an online business The Malt Miller is growing dramatically. We’d created them a new website some eighteen months ago and the number of orders was increasing month on month. It rapidly reached a point where the management team were struggling to find the time to review the Analytics data that the site was gathering and they lacked the necessary specialist knowledge to analyse and interpret that data effectively.

We knew from experience how valuable this analytics data might be to The Malt Miller. We therefore proposed we undertake a monthly “deep dive” into their Google Analytics data to see if these statistics were indicating any areas of the website’s performance that we might be able to improve. We were not disappointed!

Over the course of a six-month programme we undertook a detailed review of the analytics data and we were able to identify several key things that needed to be addressed.

When we applied these changes, we saw some truly dramatic benefits and we were able to quantify these in terms of extra revenue generated as a direct result. Some of these numbers were outstanding. For example, early on we identified that 54% of all organic site visits were coming from mobile devices but that traffic was only generating 27% of the revenue.

Quite clearly mobile traffic was significantly underperforming vs traffic from desktop devices.

The statistics were able to show us that this mobile generated traffic had:

• a higher bounce rate,
• a much higher shopping cart abandonment rate,
• a significantly lower conversion rate.

The key question was why?

Through detailed analysis of Google’s Analytics data, we created an action plan that recommended several tweaks and changes to the website. These ranged from adjusting the font size to implementing a fast guest checkout. We applied these changes and were delighted to see an increase of 23% in revenues from mobile traffic in just two months.

During these monthly “deep dives” into the data we were able to identify other opportunities to improve the website performance and to significantly impact revenues.

Just two such examples were the recommendation to include free shipping over a certain order value/basket weight to reduce shopping cart abandonments. This simple recommendation resulted in a dramatic jump in revenues – up 37% in two months. Similarly, the addition of an “Add to Wish List” option was instrumental in creating an additional 6.5% in the first month alone.

These dramatic revenue increases were driven by gaining a better insight into the performance of the website and ultimately the operation of business itself. These benefits were gained by analysing the data gathered via the free service provided by Google Analytics. This data is freely available and therefore every website could potentially make significant performance improvements and revenue gains simply by studying and correctly interpreting the statistics available.

If, like the Malt Miller management team, you just don’t have the time and expertise to do this for your business then we would be delighted to help you!

Don’t miss out on revenue-generating opportunities.