What is the simplest CRO habit you can get into now?
Can you remember every little change to your Shopify store in the past 6 months? It is impossible to remember of all the details, let alone know how they impacted the business.
You can fix this by taking notes about your store in Google Analytics. By creating an annotation you mark a point in time. Then you can use the marker to remind yourself what changed on that day. You can compare periods before and after the event and investigate the impact of the change on your website.
What you could make notes about:
- visual/functional changes to your store
- marketing events and campaigns you’ve run
- important events in your niche
Sounds too simple to be serious, right?
Your annotation helps you put the data into perspective. This new angle offers you insight or urges you to explore the effect, thus deepening the experience you have in growing and managing your store.
You’ll have a rough idea of “what caused what”. Why rough? Because you aren’t running an experiment with controlled conditions. You are just documenting your journey ahead so that you can learn from the steps you’ve taken.
How to use Annotations in Google Analytics?
Here is a short video explaining the process:
To create an annotation in Google Analytics:
- Click the small tab below the timeline.
- Click ‘+ Create new annotation’.
- Select the date for the annotation.
- Enter your note.
- Select the visibility of the annotation (if you have ‘Read & Analyze’ access you will only be able to create private annotations).
- Click ‘Save’.
What to write in the annotation?
Describe concisely and objectively what happened. For example:
- “rolled out a new color scheme”
- “redesigned cart page”
- “updated the theme to version 4.1.2”
- “insert-important-infulencer-name mentioned us on Twitter”
- “new product X was launched”
- “campaign #34 was sent”
Keeping the habit of logging the major events around your store will help you understand quickly what caused that spike of visitors last Tuesday or give you some ideas to investigate the drop in conversion rate next week.
If you’ve read this far, you’ll like my guide to discovering missed revenue opportunities on your Shopify store!