Feel like your marketing team is drowning in analytics reports? You’re not alone. Data surrounds today’s marketers, making it difficult to understand how to connect business problems to the data that offers a solution.
One use case for web analytics data is reducing customer friction points.
In a presentation at the Fall MarTech Conference, Julie Jones, product manager at Baylor Scott & White Health, demonstrated for marketers how to create an actionable list of events they need to track and the reports they need to create to eliminate customer friction points.
The key to quick, actionable insights about friction points, Jones said, is thoughtful event tracking and the right event structure.
Dig deeper: Understanding customer entry and exit in event-based journeys
Don’t try to track everything
Thoughtful event tracking doesn’t mean tracking everything, because that’s not the key to identifying friction points.
“Tracking everything creates a number of problems,” Jones said, “including too much data. If you’re on a free platform like Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you’ll hit platform limitations if you try to track too much. You also risk having a lack of data structure if you decide to enable auto-tracking in order to track everything.”
This often leads to high cardinality if you have similar functionality throughout your website.
Finally, tracking everything increases your risk of having personally identifiable data (PII) link into your analytics platform, which is against Google Analytics terms of service. So what should marketers track? Track page views, which is done by default on most platforms. Next, track the important clicks, including:
- Navigation.
- CTAs.
- Any outbound clicks.
- Downloads
- Contact clicks.
You should also track form submissions. You’ll want to do a lot of QA with forms because auto tracking for forms is unreliable on some platforms.
Lastly, track your site search, either within your platform UI or by configuring it within Google Tag Manager.
“Once you have the events you want to track,” Jones said, “it’s time to think about event structure. This wasn’t an issue with Universal Analytics because, regardless of the custom event tracking you did, you always had our category, our action and our label.”
With GA 4, event-based data models became front and center. And that means easier reporting with custom event descriptors, but it requires a little bit more planning upfront.
The examples in this article use GA4, but for users who aren’t on GA4 or who prefer session-based data, Jones recommends looking at tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude and Pivot Pro. Remember, each platform uses its own terms and nomenclature.
Dig deeper: How to grow your organic reach with behavioral analytics insights
Report No. 1: Do you have the right words on your page?
Within the reports Jones recommends, you’re not going to see any mention of bounce rate. And that’s because bounce rate is not going to give you quick, actionable insights.
Bounce rate tells you where people are abandoning your website, but it’s not going to tell you why.
The first report looks to see if you have the right words on your page. This includes your content, but it also includes your CTAs.
You want to understand which pages have the highest use of the site’s global navigation, which indicates a visitor looked at your page, didn’t find what they were looking for, didn’t find the right CTA and immediately went up to the global navigation.
Here’s how Jones builds the first part of the report:
The second part of the report looks at which global navigation elements are being clicked. Here’s how Jones puts that together:
Report No. 2: Unsatisfactory search experiences
The next report Jones suggests is unsatisfactory search results. Ideally, you want people to use search on your website only once, because they find what they’re looking for immediately. You don’t want them to have to search two times.
Here’s how you create a report for unsatisfactory searches and the search term they use on their second search:
Report No. 3: Frustrating buttons and misleading button text
When you can determine which buttons your users are clicking more than once, you can identify and solve a number of friction points.
Here’s how Jones builds that report:
The post 3 reports in GA4 that use analytics to eliminate customer friction appeared first on MarTech.
# 3 GA4 Reports to Analyze and Reduce Customer Friction
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has revolutionized the way businesses track and analyze user behavior across websites and apps. With its event-based data model and advanced reporting capabilities, GA4 offers unparalleled insights into customer journeys. One of the most valuable applications of GA4 is identifying and reducing customer friction—those moments where users encounter obstacles that prevent them from achieving their goals, such as completing a purchase or signing up for a service. By leveraging specific GA4 reports, businesses can pinpoint these pain points and take actionable steps to improve user experience and drive conversions.
In this article, we’ll explore **three key GA4 reports** that can help you analyze and reduce customer friction.
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## 1. **Path Exploration Report**
The Path Exploration report in GA4 is a powerful tool for visualizing the steps users take on your website or app. This report enables you to track user journeys from entry to exit and identify where users drop off or encounter friction.
### How to Use the Path Exploration Report:
– **Identify Drop-Off Points:** Use the report to analyze the paths users take after landing on key pages, such as your homepage or product pages. Look for patterns where users frequently abandon their journey, such as leaving the site from the cart page or exiting after visiting a pricing page.
– **Optimize Key Pages:** If you notice high drop-off rates on specific pages, investigate further. Are these pages slow to load? Is the content unclear or irrelevant? Are there too many distractions or unnecessary steps in the process? Addressing these issues can significantly reduce friction.
– **Analyze User Intent:** The report can also reveal unexpected user behavior. For instance, if users frequently navigate to unrelated pages, it may indicate that your site’s navigation or search functionality isn’t intuitive.
### Actionable Insights:
– Simplify checkout processes to reduce cart abandonment.
– Improve the clarity of calls-to-action (CTAs) on high-exit pages.
– Ensure that critical pages (e.g., product pages or forms) are mobile-friendly and load quickly.
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## 2. **Funnel Exploration Report**
The Funnel Exploration report allows you to create custom funnels to analyze how users progress through specific workflows, such as signing up for a newsletter, completing a purchase, or downloading a resource. This report is particularly useful for identifying bottlenecks in multi-step processes.
### How to Use the Funnel Exploration Report:
– **Create Custom Funnels:** Define the steps users need to take to complete a specific goal. For example, for an e-commerce site, the funnel might include steps like “Product Page View,” “Add to Cart,” “Initiate Checkout,” and “Purchase.”
– **Measure Conversion Rates:** The report provides conversion rates for each step, making it easy to see where users are dropping off.
– **Compare Segments:** Use segmentation to compare different user groups, such as new vs. returning users or mobile vs. desktop users. This can help you identify whether specific segments are experiencing more friction than others.
### Actionable Insights:
– If users are dropping off during the checkout process, consider simplifying the form fields, offering guest checkout options, or providing clear error messages.
– If mobile users have lower conversion rates, optimize your site for mobile usability.
– Use retargeting campaigns to re-engage users who drop off before completing a purchase.
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## 3. **Engagement Overview Report**
The Engagement Overview report provides a high-level summary of how users interact with your site or app. Metrics like engagement rate, average engagement time, and event counts can help you understand whether users are finding value in your content or encountering friction.
### How to Use the Engagement Overview Report:
– **Monitor Engagement Metrics:** A low engagement rate or short average engagement time may indicate that users aren’t finding your content relevant or engaging. This could be a sign of friction, such as confusing navigation, irrelevant content, or poor design.
– **Track Key Events:** GA4 allows you to track specific events, such as button clicks, video plays, or form submissions. Use this data to see if users are interacting with the elements you expect them to.
– **Analyze Bounce Rates:** While GA4 doesn’t use traditional bounce rates, you can still analyze single-page sessions or short engagement times to identify pages that may be causing users to leave.
### Actionable Insights:
– Improve content relevance by aligning it with user intent. For example, ensure that landing pages match the keywords or ads that brought users to your site.
– Use heatmaps or session recordings (via tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg) to supplement GA4 data and identify usability issues.
– Optimize CTAs to make them more compelling and visible.
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## Bonus Tip: Use GA4’s Predictive Metrics
GA4 includes predictive metrics like “Purchase Probability” and “Churn Probability,” which can help you proactively identify users who are likely to encounter friction. By targeting these users
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