For the last two weeks I’ve been playing with Google analytics more and more.  I just have to say wow, this is pretty cool.  I’ve always used the analytics just to monitor the hits on my website but now I’m starting to learn that it can be much more,  I love to fish so I feel that it’s going to be a appropriate metaphor for this topic.  Now how is fishing related to Google analytics?  Lets say that each page on your site is the bait and the goal to hook the customers into buying your products.  Now to know if your bait is working or not you can take advantage of this thing called a funnel in Google analytics,  to set up your funnel simply monitor the clicks on each page that heads towards your checkout.  After some time you will notice that a couple of pages are scaring away people, this could be for a number of reasons but play around, change things up and see what happens.

After you have a good idea where people are being scared off you can then change that page to see if you increase the hits to the next page, kind of like changing the bait.  After some time of monitoring your funnel you will understand how to get the max amount of people getting to that check out page.  As always though the less pages it takes for a customer to get to the checkout from the home page the better.  You have to remember though sometimes the fish can get smart and you may need to change the bait every so often to stay competitive.  Play around with different things on your shopping cart page, try and reduce the amount of clicks till a product is being shipped to the client!

Any way those are my thoughts for this afternoon.