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Decoding Website Conversion: When Numbers Don't Add Up
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Analytics discrepancies can drive even the most seasoned marketers to frustration. When faced with conflicting data between Shopify and Google Analytics, how do you make informed decisions about your marketing strategy? This question sits at the heart of our latest client case study.
We've discovered that since the transition to GA4, many marketers (ourselves included) have developed significant trust issues with Google's flagship analytics platform. The new interface and measurement methodology have created challenges that require a hybrid approach: trusting Shopify for revenue data while leveraging GA4 for attribution insights. This balancing act has become crucial for businesses looking to understand their true performance metrics.
Our client's recent homepage redesign provided a fascinating look at how analytics can sometimes tell misleading stories. While conversion rates improved significantly, we uncovered a 79% decrease in homepage sessions – a direct result of shifting advertising focus to a new, lower-margin product. This revealed a fundamental truth about conversion optimization: higher conversion rates aren't always indicative of success, especially when they come at the expense of traffic volume. The real goal should be maximizing total conversions and revenue, not just percentage rates.
The solution requires a sophisticated, multi-channel funnel approach. By strategically distributing ad budgets between new products and established high-margin offerings, businesses can balance customer acquisition with profitability. Sometimes, counterintuitively, directing traffic to the homepage rather than product pages creates a discovery journey that increases purchase commitment.
Are you facing similar challenges with your e-commerce analytics? Have you developed a systematic approach to testing marketing changes and measuring their impact? Join the conversation and share your experiences with navigating the complex world of digital marketing analytics.
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Analytics Discrepancies Between Platforms
Speaker 1So I have a client that is we're trying to figure out what's going on with the website. We're looking at conversion rates, we're looking at sessions, we're looking at where people are going, what pages are converting, and then we've also noticed that different analytics on their website versus Google Analytics itself. They have different numbers, which is interesting. Google analytics itself they have different numbers, which is interesting. Obviously, I think we've I know, you know, we don't find that shopify, which is what they're using in google analytics, they don't line up very well like you can get kind of a gist from both and a lot of the times you can see trends together, like if you have more sessions on Shopify.
Speaker 1it also shows that on Google analytics. But the but it's also different, like they're different numbers, they're not the same.
Speaker 2Right.
Speaker 1And so we've kind of been trying to diagnose what are we seeing and like what's the best path forward to try to increase sessions and increase conversions and things like that?
Speaker 2Sometimes we have to look at them relative to each other as well. Yeah, now with Google analytics, I actually don't trust them that much anymore.
Speaker 2Yeah, Like which is a sad, but and I've talked- to multiple marketers about this and they all feel the same way to where they just hate the new Google analytics for, often referred to as GA four. Yeah and yeah it's. It's just it's not great. I really miss the old universal analytics, but they've depreciated it, so now we kind of just have to take it with a grain of salt. I would definitely trust purchase information more on Shopify, but attribution more on Google Analytics.
GA4 Limitations and Trust Issues
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, I mean for Shopify. If you have an online store and you're selling primarily online or you're running, you sell some online, but you run any point of purchase sales through the site too, that's going to be accurate. You're running all your financials through there it makes sense that that's accurate. Where it starts to get murky is the sessions. Who's coming and who they attribute the traffic to? That's where it struggles really bad and so, yeah, trying to figure out.
Speaker 1The balance between them has been the biggest thing. One will say one, one will say something different.
Speaker 2So for this particular company we're going to look mostly at just Google Analytics. We can show a little bit of the discrepancies, but for the exercise here we're going to look just Google Analytics. We can show a little bit of the discrepancies, but this is for the exercise. Here we're going to look at Google Analytics. So this company that we're looking at, and just since they're clients, we won't say their names or anything, we'll kind of keep their data private. But we're looking at the last 30 days, so July 22nd through August 20th, and we're comparing it to the previous year because with this particular company there's some seasonality and it's worth noting that back in, I think around June, early June, we redid their homepage. It was needing some life to it.
Speaker 2Yeah, Some maintenance, some restructuring Right yeah, it wasn't structured New content more content Right yeah, so basically, when we look at it as a whole, they were a little concerned that their revenue numbers weren't where they wanted to be right, like recently is that correct?
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah yeah, so we want to know why. So we're going to open up GA4, which you can see on my screen, and we're going to look at some metrics. So, right off the bat, it's really interesting. We see, we're comparing the last 30 days. We can see that the number of sessions are up, active users are up, new users, engagement on the site, which I mean that one's huge, yeah, a huge increase.
Speaker 2Key events Now, an event is something that's important to the business. The main key event would be a purchase, and so when we look, you know you can set up key events to be whatever you want. Heck, you can even have it be page views, if that's what you really were after, yeah, yeah, and so it's a matter of what you define. So you can see there's a few different purchase events, but then you can see revenue and session key event rate in which we have purchase selected. So essentially, that's saying out of how many people came to the website, how many people purchased, and it puts that in a percentage. Yeah, that's kind of what the event rate is.
Speaker 2So we can see, and this will be blurred out for you guys, but this first item here is one of their new products and we can see here, last year they had no traffic at all because it wasn't live yet, and this year they have a bunch of traffic. Compare that to their home page, which this represents their home page we can see we had a massive decrease. And so, jesse, I mean you're in this account a lot more often than I am like from, like the social side of things, what? What are your takeaways here?
Speaker 1well, I think at first is we've structured a lot of the ads to go to that new product, which makes sense. When you launch a new product, you want to try to convert people as soon as possible, whether that's a landing page and then it goes to a purchase screen or just the. For this it's just the, the actual product page itself, and so we've shifted a lot of the ads to that which makes sense, why that one has so much traffic. And if you look at the homepage, it is a lot less than it was. It's 13,000 sessions less.
Speaker 2So yeah, it's a big difference. When we say sessions, we're referring to website visits, sessions less.
Speaker 1So, yeah, it's a big difference.
Speaker 2When we say sessions, we're referring to like website visits. Yeah, website visits, right, yeah, so we can see here there is almost a 79% decrease in sessions on the homepage when we compare it to this time last year. Yeah, right, and so you know. When you see this, it's like oh my goodness like this is terrible.
Speaker 1We need to fix it.
Speaker 2But the importance of keeping track of what you do like with your marketing efforts.
Speaker 1This speaks really well to that, because you were involved in creating these social media ad campaigns yeah you can be like oh, I know what's happening there yeah, right, and so, as we look at this and if we want to with this specific client, you have two products that are their big focus. So there's the new product that they came out with, which is a lower tier or a less expensive option, which also means that their revenue or profit is also going to be smaller on those products versus their top tier product, which would be the third one, one of the ones further down right, this one probably yeah, that's a landing page, but the so anyway, it's one of those other products now, oh, it's right there.
Speaker 1So that product, right there, is their top tier product. So that product, when they get sold like that's their, that's the top of the line, that's what they want to sell the most of and I think, shifting all the traffic, or 90% of the traffic through ads to the new product with a lower price point, lower margin, I think that's where you see the decrease in revenue from the sales. Now, that being said, when we actually look at the Shopify conversion rate and how many orders we we have, we're up a ton of orders year over year right.
Understanding Conversion Rates Properly
Speaker 2Yeah, we're comparing it to right, year over year because in this case you can compare numbers two different ways or probably more, but like the, the main ones are period over period right which is the last, like in this case the last 30 days, compared to the previous 30 days right or there's year over year, which is the last 30 days compared to that same time last year which, which, when you're looking at long-term trends, that makes more sense because, there's so much seasonality to almost everything.
Speaker 1Well, I mean, especially for this specific client, there's a lot of seasonality, so one month might be huge, then the next month be really slow. I think this time of year anyway, when we're getting close to Q4, everything starts to slow down and then once you hit September, it kind of ramps back up and then you kind of have a Q4, like kind of the ramp through Q4. And that's normal. It's someone that I've been with for three years, so I've seen the seasonality and that's what always happens.
Speaker 2So let me go back to the homepage changes that we made. Yeah, so I would love to just pat ourselves on the back, but there are some issues with that and with these numbers that we're seeing.
Speaker 1Yeah right.
Speaker 2And this kind of emphasizes the importance of just understanding what's going on in your own business. So we saw a big increase in conversion rate on the homepage. So we're like, oh sweet, more people that came to the homepage purchased.
Speaker 2However, there's more to the story that we've already mentioned, and that's the decrease in number of sessions. Whenever you do that especially on more of a top-of-funnel advertising campaign like social media anytime you pull away traffic from those sources, your conversion rate is going to go up, no matter what right. So the home page changes may or may not have made a difference. The only way to know that for sure is looking at organic traffic conversion rate for that specific landing page and seeing what happened there. So, yeah, there's tons of different ways to look at this.
Speaker 1But yeah, conversion rate can be. It's a good metric to obviously see and want to improve on. But we've had clients me and you've had clients where they were obsessed with conversion rate to the point of where we basically said we can give you a 50% conversion rate if two people go to your site and one buys, that's a 50% conversion rate and it kind of puts into perspective. You got to calm down a little bit because as we increase sessions your conversion rate may drop some and it's because the higher influx of people they're still not going to always convert, especially if we're doing some sort of ads that aren't aren't necessarily bottom of funnel, it's top of funnel.
Speaker 2Just trying to write your name out there. That's completely different. They need to be exposed to it like at least seven times, yeah. And so when you put in a big amount of people into that top part of the funnel they've seen you once they may not purchase, unless you have some crazy sale going on right where you make it a no-brainer.
Speaker 1but, like you have to walk them through that process, you have to have processes in place, or processes or whatever in place to be able to capture those people when they engage with you the first time and then use other sources like email campaigns and things like that, to walk them through um to get you, to get them exposed to the brand more or like how we, I like how I like to do meta ads is I built like a funnel system where the top, the top two that are are just the campaigns are all for awareness.
Speaker 1So it's it's all for getting your name out there, getting to as many people as possible and the ones that click through to your website. The next campaigns are set up for anybody that has been to our website for the last 365 days, so now those people have moved down into the next one, where it goes okay within the last 60 days we have a real bottom funnel where we're doing catalog ads.
Creating Effective Marketing Funnels
Speaker 1All we're showing is, hey, this is the product, this is the price you should purchase, and it goes from more of a storytelling down to like here's features of our product to buy and it funnels them down into each one and it works really well.
Speaker 2So you definitely should do that from like each channel that you're working on. So the advertising channel. Create that funnel process, yeah, but also have it on the website as well, so that, yes, at any point people would come to your website and if you can get them to give you your email address like, then you can get them down that funnel right so you kind of have multiple funnels going on at once.
Speaker 2And it's a great way to conduct business and it would definitely be beneficial for any company to implement. What should this company do? Let's also look at the conversion rate of this product. This product that's getting most of the traffic only has a 0.2% conversion rate. When we compare that to the, only has a 0.2% conversion rate. Yeah, when we compare that to the homepage at a 0.7.
Speaker 1Yeah right.
Speaker 2What should we do about that?
Speaker 1So what the plan will be is to shift a lot, since it is still a new product and we want people introduced to it on the page. We're not going to pull all the ads from that, but what I'll do is I'll take about 50% of whatever ad budget is. Let's say we have seven campaigns going. I'm going to take four of those and move it to the homepage or move it to, let's say, three to the homepage and move one back to that top tier product that they really want to push continuously. That's been a staple for them for two years, right, and so we'll do that instead and hopefully that helps really convert people and give them the option to, if you're buying, let's say, this top product that's new is a bottom entry point and we want to move them up. Right, we want to move them up to the next one, if we can, right, like we want to walk them up the different kinds of uh products so that they can hopefully purchase our top one that we get the most profit from um.
Speaker 1so that's kind of what we would like to do and that's kind of how we set up the home page, and so if we can funnel more people to the home page, I think that'll be more successful, especially if we're looking at a 0.7 versus a 0.2 conversion rate. Now, as we like we said, funnel more people to the homepage, that will probably come down.
Speaker 2But even still, if it's 0.5,.
Speaker 1If it comes down 0.2 overall, we're still going to be more successful than we would be with just a 0.2 conversion rate.
Strategy Adjustment and Follow-up Plan
Speaker 2One tactic I've seen that's been kind of interesting is if you put people right on the product that they are clicking on. Sometimes that performs worse than if you put them on a completely different page, usually the home page yeah right. My theory behind that is you make it too easy, right like if you take them to the home page and they have to go through and click on some stuff to find the product they were interested in.
Speaker 1Now they've invested some time yeah, even if it's 30 seconds.
Speaker 2Oh I, I've already yeah, I've already spent the time to get this, and when they find it, they probably get a little dopamine boost.
Speaker 1Yeah, this is cool, oh sweet, I found it.
Speaker 2And I think they're going to be more likely to purchase. So it'll be interesting to also look at the conversion rate on the social ad side of things to see. Are they more likely to purchase when they land on the homepage ad side of things to see. Is it more likely to? Are they more likely to purchase when they land on the home page or on that product page? Yeah, and then from there, make a decision on where to drive that yeah, and and what?
Speaker 1we're going to be implementing these into our client campaigns and strategy over the next, let's say, month or two months, and we'll follow up with this and see okay what has changed and we'll kind up with this and see, okay, what has changed, and we'll kind of keep a screenshot of what the analytics are now and then we'll look in a couple months and see what changed and what did we implement to make these changes so we can see what's changed. Because, who knows, we may switch it over and the 0.69 plummets a conversion rate to like a really, really low conversion rate and you're like, okay, well, all right, let's look at what we're doing and seeing if it's actually worth it. Yeah.
Speaker 2A good follow-up schedule. That I like to do when I make a major change, like that is. I like to follow up one day after, just to make sure nothing crazy happens.
Speaker 1Yeah right.
Speaker 2Then three days, seven days, 14 days, 21 and 30. Yeah, Like basically checking on it, like once a week you got to give it time to run for it. Like the algorithms and stuff to to adjust and so. But yeah, that's, that's a really good followup schedule that we use all the time.
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