When online retailers look at product sales reports, they always ask a fairly common question: why are certain products on my site performing so poorly? Well, analyzing the right set of metrics can provide you with the answers you need.

First, you need to know that every product you offer in your store is important. If you care about improving your store's conversion rate and want to maximize sales, you need to care about the performance of every product in your store. 

Not just your "new products"  in-store, and not just your best selling products. 

The key to seeing incremental sales in your ecommerce business while reducing costs is to make sure that every product in your store sells well.

So, that means when a product is underperforming, you need to quickly diagnose the problem and find a solution.

Today, we’ll start by looking at how to identify and fix low-performing products and product detail pages.

Next week, we’ll cover how to optimize your “Product Lists,” or arrangements of products in your ecommerce store.

Let’s get started!

Let’s say you’re the marketing director for an ecommerce company that sells outdoor camping gear. 

You’re reviewing your weekly Google Analytics reports, and notice that sales for one of your most popular products, your Helmet Camera, plummets to 50% of what it was the same time last year.

You also see that revenue from one of your newer products (a Camping Mug) has skyrocketed to 200% of what it was the same week last year.

The most question that immediately comes to you is:

“What is causing the huge drop in Helmet Camera sales this week, and the spectacular spike in Camping Mug purchases?”

Is it something you did with your Adwords and Facebook ads? Or is it a change you made in your website design? This is where product performance analysis can help.

To start investigating your product performance data, you can go to the Product Performance report in Google Analytics (Conversions > Ecommerce > Product Performance).

The Product Performance report shows which products are most frequently viewed, added to cart, and ultimately purchased in a transaction.

This is where you want to go to break down your product performance based on the different ways your company organizes products on your site (name, category, brand, stock keeping unit or SKU, etc).

Just so we’re on the same page, let’s start with a quick overview of what the 8 default summary metrics in the report mean:

Now that you know what the summary product metrics mean, let’s start with Step 1!

Step 1: 

Evaluate if customer satisfaction is an issue by looking for products with a high total refund amount.

Let’s go back to the example from before — you’re wondering why the Helmet Cameras product is underperforming compared to last year.

You notice that, compared to the other products on your site, the Helmet Camera has a high Average Price and low Average Quantity. 

This means that your Helmet Camera is an expensive product, and your customers buy fewer units of them. As such, a high amount of refunds may be why your revenue is lower than expected.

To test this hypothesis, look at the Product Refund Amount. Indeed, Helmet Cameras have a very high Refund Amount, accounting for 95% of your total refunds.

A high product refund amount may suggest at least 2 possibilities:

• Customers were not satisfied with the product itself (e.g. there is a product defect)

• There was a mismatch between customer expectations from advertisements and the actual product.

Next Action: Check your ad copy and talk to your customer support team to see why customers are asking for so many refunds.

Step 2: 

Investigate “problem products” that are not being added to cart or purchased

Next, you notice that the “Backpacking Tent” product has only had 1 unique purchase in this time period. Why aren’t the Backpacking Tents selling?

To answer this question, we need to go to a different part of the report — the Shopping Behavior metrics.

Click on the Shopping Behavior tab at the top.

Here you’ll see Shopping Behavior metrics related to how your customers are interacting with your products.

Here’s a quick summary of what each shopping behavior metric measures:

Now what you’re looking for here are 2 main kinds of “problem products”:

• Products that customers are not adding to their cart after reading the detail page (the cart-to-detail rate)

• Products that customers are not purchasing after reading the detail page (the buy-to-detail rate)

Next Action: To find these “problem products,” sort the products by cart-to-detail rates and buy-to-detail rates.

Step 3: 

Fix the problems with your product detail pages

When your Cart-to-Detail Rate and Buy-to-Detail Rate are low, your product detail pages may be the problem.

For example, when you have a low Cart-to-Detail Rate, this means that of the people who viewed a product detail page, few added the product to cart. This probably means that there is a disconnect between (1) what the customer expected based on how it was marketed, and (2) the product they’re seeing now on the detail pages.

Make sure you don’t oversell your products and underdeliver in your ads, or you’ll lose potential customers. 

Common discrepancies between ads and ecommerce websites include:

• The prices on your ads and the prices on your website are different

• The product may be out-of-stock

• Overpromising in ads (e.g. exaggerated claims about benefits) and under-delivering on product pages

Next Action: To avoid these pitfalls, check your ad campaigns to make sure that the pricing and messaging are consistent between your ads and your website.

It’s also possible that the steps of the shopping process itself may be the issue.

Some common shopping process issues include:

• A technical error that prevents users from adding to cart

• Unusually high shipping costs or long shipping times

• Abandoning cart if comparison shoppers found better prices with your competitors

Next Action: Use the Shopping Behavior reports to check if these are issues for your website.

Bonus: Last but not least, if you tagged your products with tags such as SKU, product category, or brand, I would recommend clicking on those tabs in the report to see what categories and brands are overperforming and underperforming.

where many eCommerce business stores focus on general metrics like purchase, revenue and visitors, there is a lot to be learned when adding in product-level insights. Product performance analytics is a critical part of optimizing eCommerce operations, and data directly product performance and usability can be effective in helping you increase and improve your overall operations and increase the revenue.