A website or smartphone application is an online version of a shop, where an individual can view, buy, and pay for goods or services conveniently. Businesses would have to analyze customer behavior patterns, sales figures, and sources of traffic to enhance the shopping experience of their customers.
With its advanced features, Google Analytics enables e-commerce entities to keep records and assess user activity across their sites, helping them use, boost, and keep customers through more knowledgeable and data-driven approaches. After configuring e-commerce tracking, business experts can analyze sales, track various items, and optimize advertising efforts.
In this guide, we will explain what Google Analytics is and how it is crucial for growing your e-commerce store, while also providing a detailed way to set it up. So, let’s dive right in!
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool that comes with a set of features that improve the understanding of your website’s audience, acquisition, behavioral patterns, and profitability.
Becoming familiar with how Google Analytics works will earn you back its full cost many times over as you implement calculated modifications to your online store and how your visitors interact with your website and traffic sources—all of which can be used for re-targeting and capturing new customers while minimizing lost sales opportunities.
Google Analytics imprints a more precise and user-friendly way of analyzing the data, and with the shift towards this new platform, it is also the easiest it has ever been to gain valuable insights that can help grow your business.
Why You Need Google Analytics to Grow Your Ecommerce Store
If you owned a physical retail store, you would see how many shoppers are walking around and which products are attracting their attention, which ones are being added to the cart, and which ones are simply being left on the shelf.
Establishing eCommerce analytics along with relevant KPIs not only helps in making sense of the data but also addresses deeper-level questions such as:
- What are the top products and pages that receive the highest traffic on your website?
- What is the average time people spend on each page?
- Which pages on your site are the most profitable?
- How does traffic value from search engines stack up against social media advertisements?
- Which marketing campaigns are the biggest culprits in attracting low-engagement traffic?
- What is the ratio of new visitors to returning ones?
- What percentage of visitors add items to their carts, and how many of those actually check out?
- What are the most common devices used to access your website?
Solutions for these and so many more questions can be discovered with Google Analytics and these inform your marketing plans, website design, product strategy, pricing, copywriting, and every important business decision.
If you are not using Google Analytics, understanding the issues with your ecommerce website can be challenging. Are you struggling with fewer people wanting to add to cart on your product page? Is your surprise checkout shipping cost turning visitors away? These are only some of the questions we will cover later in the lesson.
Once you have Google Analytics, the possibilities are endless. Now, for example, you can see the majority of your traffic is coming from Facebook Ads and your engagement is extremely low. This allows you to narrow down your assumptions, such as using more engaging advertisements or needing more creative product descriptions.
Now try to imagine not having someone to guide you through your business decision making. It would be chaos right? This is why Google Analytics is so important, it allows you to make informed decisions instead of having to gamble everything on a guess.
Setting Up Google Analytics for Ecommerce Websites
Integrating Google Analytics with your ecommerce website will take only a handful of clicks but you must first know the specifics of your site’s platform. For example, if you are using Shopify, creating your Google account is all you need in order to link your website and tag it into the Google Analytics application on YouTube.
1. Create an Account for Google Analytics
The first step is to get a free Google Account, which is needed for Google Analytics ecommerce. Google accounts can be created through Gmail accounts.
If you do not have one, you can create one through Google and then access Google Analytics eCommerce tracking by clicking on the top.
2. Create an Account and your Property
In case you do not have a Google Analytics account, go to Google Analytics after signing in and try to create an account. This will make a new profile for you to manage your eCommerce site analytics and most people use their name or business name. It is important to add the value of “Next” so as to proceed towards the next step of appending the first property to your account. In case you already possess a Google Analytics account, go to the Admin page and click on your Property under the Admin page.
Obtain your new property’s name, currency, and reporting time zone on the next screen. Even if the user’s time zone is different, reporting will be done in the selected time zone. Reporting time zones automatically adjust for daylight savings.
Afterwards, click “Next” to provide your business size and choose your industry category.
Finally, click “Create” while accepting the “Analytics Terms of Service and the Data Processing Amendment.”
3. Add Google Analytics Tag to Your Website
After creating the data stream, a tag needs to be placed to track the website visitors. In order to do that, the Google & YouTube app needs to be downloaded first.
To download the app, navigate to your “Online Store Preferences” and then click “Update account” in the Google Analytics module. This will allow you to download the app. Once it’s downloaded, select “Connect your Google Account.” Then, in the dropdown box, select your Google Analytics 4 property and click “connect.”
Provided that the Google and YouTube apps are active, simply open the app and tap the home card labeled “Optimize your Business with Google Analytics” to select and link your Google Analytics 4 property.
4. Establish Conversion Actions and Audiences
If you are just starting out, connect your Google Analytics 4 account to Google Ads and select the Personalized Advertising option. That way, the audiences will be found in the shared library in Google Ads.
After that, the Google Analytics audiences may be added to the campaign or ad group using the “Audiences” section within the “Targeting” options.
If you plan on using Google Analytics, it is crucial that you migrate Universal Analytics audiences over to ensure a seamless transition.
Once these changes have been made, go to the campaigns and ad groups in Google Ads and add the Google Analytics 4 audiences. Any duplicates from Universal Analytics or Google Analytics will automatically be removed so no additional action is required.
5. Analyzing Conversions Through Events
If you’re new to GA4, you’ll notice that conversion tracking within the tool happens at the event level. You can create or select an event that captures any key engagement with your site and configure the event as a conversion.
For those who have been seasoned users of Universal Analytics, you would know that measuring conversions was done by setting up goals and tracking ecommerce transactions. On the other hand, in Google Analytics 4, conversions are tracked through events.
To make the switch, you will have to create events and mark them as conversions in Google Analytics 4.
3 Common Google Analytics Mistakes
You can only be as good as your tools and data will service. To fully utilize your instance for Google Analytics, make sure you do not make these common mistakes.
1. Failing to Track Ecommerce
The ecommerce reports are the primary reason for enabling tracking in the first place. Ecommerce tracking should not be confused with the regular reporting done by Google Analytics.
Instead, enabling eCommerce tracking makes available previously restricted eCommerce reports to help online retailers capture and analyze eCommerce data as well as further study customer engagement.
2. Home or office IPs are Not Excluded
To ensure that your data is correct, it is important to minimize internal traffic. For example, if your staff is changing the procedures of your checkout funnel and trying to buy something, any purchases that were not completely paid for may lead to an increased rate of abandonment and harm the conversion rate of the site.
To reduce these kinds of situations, you can create a filter in GA to exclude internal traffic. This means that all the IP addresses you have will not be tracked by Google. To do this procedure:
- Create a new filter with a descriptive name such as “Exclude Internal IP” so that you do not forget its purpose.
- Set the type of the filter to Custom.
- In the dropdown menu “Filter Field,” choose IP Address.
- In the “Filter Pattern,” fill in the IP address that you do not want Google to track.
Tip: In case you want to exclude more IP addresses (let us say you work with an agency partner), you can add other patterns separated by a pipe symbol “|.”
3. Stakeholding on a Single Dashboard
The amount of data Google Analytics offers to ecommerce merchants is staggering, which is why it is considered a critical part of the ecommerce business. Metrics such as time on page and number of sessions are important and useful data points to determine how well your site is performing.
Nevertheless, make sure you go beyond just looking at numbers. Be meticulous and consult other dashboards and reports to ensure that you have the necessary information in order to make the best decision possible. This will also help confirm that your Google Analytics account is working properly on your website.
5 Essential Google Analytics Reports for Ecommerce
Google Analytics has dozens, if not hundreds, of reports that can be systemized in a myriad of ways. Nevertheless, even novice users can benefit from the best built-in Google analytics reports because they come ready to use.
Real-Time Report
The Real-Time report is where you can check the traffic on your site at that moment. It shows which users are currently on your website, from which transitions they came from which part of the world, shown on a map, and what specific pages they are looking at.
To open this dashboard, click Real-Time located in the side navigation menu. From there, you can further explore other reports including Locations, Traffic Sources, Page, Events, and Conversions under Realtime.
Acquisition reports
Every eCommerce store has visitors from different referral websites and social media platforms. Over time, Earned Visits, Conversions, and Revenue are some of the factors that an ecommerce store Acquisition reports monitor. They help you analyze your marketing resources and figure out how to increase store traffic over time.
In these reports, you can also focus over specific channels like Referrals, adding a dimension, for example, Session source, which provides the domain names of the websites that refer users to your store.
Engagement Reports
The Engagement Reports area provides an overview of the statistics that assist you in adjusting the information on the website and how users are responding to it. This includes data on how effectively your pages capture visitors, a precious metric monitored by search engines, which can greatly enhance your SEO rankings.
On this category, you are presented with an engagement overview with key detail metrics regarding engagement, like the duration of time an average user spends in your site, the most popular pages, and what is often referred to as “stickiness” among loyal users of your site.
Ecommerce Purchases Report
The most useful report, in our opinion, is the Ecommerce purchases report found under the Monetization section.
Many sellers using Shopify integrate their products, sales, and conversions with Google Analytics which gathers this information for analysis.
Attribution Reports
The attribution reports in the Advertising section may not be of immediate value when you first start to use Google Analytics, but they are essential for grasping the complete context of the customer journey towards purchase.
The more you spend on marketing and the more channels you introduce into the mix, the more important marketing attribution becomes. It shows what you are doing with your investment and how it all correlates in producing profit by means of traffic and sales to your business.
Conclusion
Without doubt, Google Analytics is invaluable to e-commerce businesses by helping them understand customer behavior patterns and their sales along with marketing effectiveness. With the proper setup and the avoidance of Google’s Analytics common pitfalls, e-commerce businesses can rely on Google driven decisions for optimizing store layout, conversions, and growth. Tracking visitors, monitoring marketing conversions, or refining advertising strategies are made easy by Google Analytics reports, which help businesses to thrive in the competitive e-commerce industry. Begin applying its complete capabilities now to make your data work for your business.
Vijay Sood is a seasoned digital marketer with a passion for driving online growth and innovation. With a robust background in developing and executing comprehensive digital strategies, Vijay excels in leveraging SEO, content marketing, and social media to boost brand visibility and engagement. His expertise lies in transforming data-driven insights into actionable marketing campaigns, helping businesses achieve their digital objectives.